joshua cohen. incentive on cohen.pdf

8/11/2019 Joshua Cohen. Incentive on Cohen.pdf

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Taking People as They Are?

Joshua Cohen

My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle ofgovernment, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Following Rousseau’s opening thought in The Social Contract , I shall assume that his phrase“men as they are“ refers to person’s moral and psychological natures and how that nature workswithin the framework of political and social institutions.

John Rawls, The Law of Peoples

It is a special pleasure to present a paper on this occasion, because I owe such a

large intellectual debt to Jerry Cohen. I will begin with a few words about that

debt and then proceed to some engagement with his recent work.

After studying lots of Marxism and German Idealism as an undergraduate,

I was trained in graduate school as an analytical philosopher, with a particular

interest in political philosophy. In graduate school, and when I started teaching, I

pursued my interest in Marx with some intensity. But I was never really able to

bring that interest within the scope of my analytical sensibility—until I read Karl

Marx’s Theory of History . Jerry wrote a defense of that theory, and I found the

defense wanting. But the interpretation of Marx struck me as pretty plausible, and

helped me to understand better what I had come to see as the insufficiencies of

Marxist social theory and of historical materialism. The book provided a larger

intellectual lesson for me, however, that extended well beyond Marx, and

theories of history: after reading it, I felt fully confident that it was possible to write

with a clear analytical conscience about any topic of real importance—the book

deepened my conviction that clarity was not an enemy of depth, and that it was

possible, through philosophy, to explore, perhaps even redeem our deepest

Cohen on Incentives, 1



convictions, without insulting our own intelligence. When I think about why

contemporary philosophy continues to be a wonderful thing, Jerry Cohen is one

of my exemplars. And I am deeply grateful to him for that.

1. Introduction

Jerry Cohen endorses a version of what John Rawls called “the difference

principle”—the principle that inequalities are fully just if and only if they maximize

the advantage of the least advantaged.1 I agree with him in this endorsement.

But having been at least partially persuaded by his criticisms of incentive

inequalities, I agree with him, too, that the content of the difference principle is

less determinate than it may seem: certainly less determinate than it seemed to

me, prior to reflection on Cohen’s arguments. Moreover, I am inclined to agree

that the resolution of this indeterminateness has important consequences for

substantive questions about the extent and kinds of inequalities that are

acceptable as a matter of justice, and also for a wide range of methodological

issues in political philosophy—about the plausibility of political liberalism, and

about the role of substantive claims about social order and human nature in

normative political thought.

Much of Cohen’s writing about incentive inequalities has been presented

as a critique of Rawls, and for the purposes of this paper, I will largely preserve

this polemical setting. In section 2, I distinguish a range of cases in which

incentive inequalities countenanced by what I will call an “ultralax” version of the

1 References to Cohen’s writings are included in the text: IIC: “Incentives, Inequality, and

Community,” WAI: “Where the Action Is”; PAI: “The Pareto Argument for Inequality”; IYE: IfYou Are An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?




difference principle are objectionable because of the content of the social

preferences and attitudes that give rise to the inequalities. While a strict version

of the difference principle, which would condemn all incentive inequalities, suffers

from excessive rigorism, only an unacceptably ultralax version would permit

incentive inequalities in all the cases I consider. In section 3, I show that there

are at least some circumstances in which a Rawlsian conception of justice will

require, contrary to Cohen’s assertions, changes in the social ethos, because

that is how institutional changes lead to a more just distribution. With these

observations about institutions and ethos as background, I then consider, in

section 4, how a Rawlsian can handle the cases of intuitively objectionable

incentive inequalities sketched in section 2. The Rawlsian response underscores

the essential role in Rawls’s formulation of egalitarianism of substantive claims

about social order and human motivations: in particular, claims about the

pervasive influence of institutions on political-economic outcomes and on culture

and identity. In section 5, I suggest that if we reject this strong “institutional

determinism,” we seem to face a choice between preserving political liberalism’s

institutional focus while backing off from egalitarianism, or preserving

egalitarianism and extending the scope of our account of justice so that the social

ethos is brought explicitly within its scope. My conclusion is not that Rawls is

right. Nor do I conclude simply that Rawls and Cohen are less far apart than

Cohen suggests—though I do think that that is true. Instead I conclude that that

Cohen’s important criticisms sharpen our sense of the options available in

political philosophy, and put considerable pressure on Rawls’s proposed

marriage of political liberalism and egalitarianism.




complain: each person can reasonably think of herself as treated with respect as

an equal, whose life matters as much as anyone’s.2

The difference principle states a compelling ideal of distributive justice for

a democratic society, but also a very incomplete one: we need in particular to

interpret the expression “needs to be” in the phrase “no one is left well-off than

anyone needs to be.” Thus suppose people with scarce productive talents

demand incentives for the use of those talents. When I say that they demand

incentives I don’t simply mean that their talents are relatively scarce and that the

availability of a range of employment options enables them to bargain, on the

basis of that scarcity, for compensation above their reservation wage: that is not

demanding an incentive, but taking what you can get. Instead, the relevant

incentive demand reflects the fact that they would genuinely prefer not to deploy

their scarce, productive talents unless they are compensated at a level that is in

fact higher than the compensation of others.3 So consider a doctor who is

perfectly able to doctor for the median wage of (say) $30,000, and would live at

least as well as everyone else if she did, but would prefer to write literary fiction

and is therefore unwilling to doctor for less than $100,000. Contrast this case

with the doctor with scarce surgical talents who would fully willing use them for

2 Rawls adds that being treated with such respect is important to self-respect, and that self-respect is a fundamental precondition of living a good life, but that is an optional additionalargument: arguably, we can reasonably demand that our social arrangements treat us withrespect as equals, without speculating about the implications for self-respect of respect fromothers, or about the importance of self-respect in living well.3 A word on the formulation: the phrase “in fact higher than the compensation of others” mayseem unnecessarily circuitous, but it is not. The crucial point when it comes to incentives is thatthe compensation is greater than the compensation of others, not that it is greater because theyinsist on being paid more than others, whatever that level happens to be. If I insist on being paid$175,000, then I insist on being paid more than anyone else in my department, given what othersare in fact paid; but it is another matter if I insist that, whatever they are paid, I must be paid 30%more. There is an important question about whether demands for relative advantage—say the




$30,000 if she thought she could not get more for doctoring, but knows that

others are willing to pay more than that, and bargains to capture more than the

reservation wage for which she would be entirely willing to work. The latter case

seems very important in the world, but the former presents the philosophical

problem.

Suppose, then, that we permit the incentives. Are the least well-off then

less well-off than anyone needs to be? Perhaps not. After all, they are less well-

off than they would be if the possessors of the scarce talents willingly used the

talents without getting the incentives: willingly used them, for example, because

of the benefits conferred by that use on other people. And surely that is typically

something the possessors of scarce talents could do.

Or should we say instead that they are no less well-off than anyone needs

to be, because “needs to be” should be interpreted holding people’s preferences

and attitudes as fixed—taking those preferences and attitudes as given, so to

speak: in Rousseau’s famous phrase, taking men as they are, and laws as they

might be. So, in particular, if we think we ought (for whatever reason) to take

preferences and attitudes as given, then when we pay the incentives no one is

less well-off than anyone needs to be, consistent with our doing what we ought to

do, in other respects.

Lax/Strict . To capture this ambiguity, Cohen distinguishes two

interpretations of the difference principle: a lax interpretation, in which we hold

preferences (he says “intentions”) as given as maximize the welfare of the least

advantaged relative to existing preferences (intentions), and a strict

demand to be paid 30% more—is especially suspect, but the incentives issue arises even without




interpretation, according to which we maximize the well-being of the least

advantaged, without taking preferences as given, but treating them instead as

assessable by our norms of justice. Though it suffices for drawing attention to an

ambiguity in the interpretation of the difference principle, this lax/strict distinction

is too crude, because there are distinctions—intuitively relevant distinctions—

among the preferences that might underlie demands for incentives. So,

correspondingly, there are differences between interpretations of the difference

principle that take some but not all preferences as given for the purposes of

maximizing the advantage of the least advantaged and interpretations that take

all preferences as given. I will call the latter—the all-preferences-as-given

interpretation—the ultra-lax difference principle.

Thus, consider five cases:

• Ascriptive Group Preferences: Consider a community with a better-

off white racist majority, whose members refuse to take on jobs that

will benefit the worse-off non-white minority unless they are paid

substantial incentives: because they are racists, they attach negative

weight to any benefits to the non-white minority, and so require

substantial material rewards to compensate for what they regard as

costs to them. According to the ultra-lax difference principle, justice

requires (and certainly permits) the payment of these incentives: by

paying them, the worse off nonwhite minority is made better off, and

given the racist social ethos, that minority otherwise be made better

off. We might tell a similar story for the case of incentives to men who

any concern for relative position.




regard economic benefits to women as a cost, and, in general, for

incentives paid to individuals whose preferences reflect a concern for

the relative advantage of any ascriptive group.

• Class Preferences: In the second case, assume an ethnically

homogeneous society divided into a better and worse off class. In this

case, imagine that the better off group aims to preserve its privileges:

they want to maintain social distance between the better and worse off

and are prepared to act in socially constructive ways only if a

substantial gap is preserved between themselves and those who are

less well-off (say, the ratio of the group medians must be at least 50:1.

So here, the ultra-lax difference principle supports incentives to

members of the privileged class because the circumstances of the less

well-off will not otherwise be improved.

• Greedy/Needy: In a third case, the greedy/needy case, the greedy live

in a society with a needy group, and also have highly elastic labor

supply functions: though the greedy are fully aware that others in the

society are living pretty badly, their willingness to supply labor that

benefits the less advantaged group is highly responsive to changes in

expected reward—not because such responsiveness helps in

bargaining, nor because they despise the less well-off, but because

they genuinely would prefer tending their gardens to being captains of

industry unless the rewards are sufficiently great. Holding these

preferences fixed, maximizing the advantage to the least advantaged

will mean large gains to the greedy and small gains to the needy. This




case is different from Class Preferences because the greedy are not

assumed to care about the relative advantage or social distance, but

only about their absolute position: it is not true of them that—to borrow

some lines from Rousseau that I will come back to later—they “value

the things they enjoy only to the extent that others are deprived of

them, and they would cease to be happy if, without any change in their

own state, the people ceased to be miserable.” But is also essential to

this case, as distinct from the next, that some people in the society are

reasonably badly off.

• Large Dispersion: In a fourth case, we once more have a population

with a greedy, advantaged group with highly elastic labor supply

functions, but this time in a community with no very needy members.

Paying the incentives that are necessary, given de facto preferences,

to maximizing the advantage of the least advantaged results in

extreme income dispersion: a dispersion that we are inclined to find

objectionable or excessive, not because of the preferences that

produce it, but just because it strikes us as objectionable that some

people live that much better than others. Using a piece of Rawlsian

terminology here, let’s say that the “contribution curve” represents the

advantages to the better off that are needed to generate maximal

advantage to the least well-off. So Large Dispersion is the case of the

relatively flat contribution curve: it rises slowly from the origin and




excusable. Since self-respect is the main primary good, the parties would not

agree, I shall assume, to count this sort of subjective loss as irrelevant.”5

But nothing in the formulation of the principles of justice as fairness

directly condemns the inequalities generated by such incentive payments as

unjust. And this leads me to conclude—I will argue for the conclusion later on—

that Rawls must have some way of excluding, from the incentives condoned by

the difference principle, at least some of the incentive inequalities permitted

under the ultra-lax difference principle. More particularly, Rawls never says what

we should do if they arise within just institutions. And that leads me to think that

Rawls must have some reason for thinking that the objectionable preferences

and attitudes will not arise, and therefore do not command separate treatment in

an account of justice.

Rigorism. Before addressing these issues, I want to take note of two

points in Cohen’s view that help to locate more precisely the challenge presented

by these cases. First, then, Cohen rejects the difference principle in its strict

reading, as too “rigoristic” (IIC, 303-4; IYE, 206 n24, 213n36). Thus it is not

unreasonable for self-interests to play a role in deciding how to spend one’s

time—that is, in making decisions about occupational choice—and so not

unreasonable for individuals to demand some incentives for performing work that

brings large benefits to the less well-off, but that they would otherwise prefer not

to do. Moreover, Andrew Williams rightly observes it seems hard to say precisely

how large an incentive a person might reasonably demand6, and David Estlund

observes that it is hard, too, to say that reasonable incentive-demanding,

5

Theory of Justice, p. 468.




inequality-generating behavior is confined to occupational choice motivated by

self-interest, as distinct, for example, from concerns about the well-being of one’s

family or social group, or about moral requirements other than the requirement to

benefit the least advantaged.7 And Cohen appears to acknowledge these

additional prerogatives. So Cohen accepts that at least some incentive

inequalities that emerge in the case of Absolute Incentives are not unjust, and

surely must agree that it is difficult precisely to circumscribe the acceptable

cases. For this reason, I put this case to the side.

Second, Cohen urges that it is unacceptably rigorist not to let the extent of

reasonable self-interest depend on how badly off the least advantaged are. If the

least well-off are themselves pretty well-off, then it seems reasonable for the

possessors of scarce talents to be more willing to give weight to their own

interests: that is, the extent of acceptable incentive-demanding behavior. Thus in

his Tanner Lectures, Cohen notes that he sometimes refers to the least well-off

as the badly off, or says that they are in conditions of “want.” And he

acknowledges that this language might seem unacceptably tendentious because

the least well-off might not be too badly off. So it might seem that a general

criticism of incentives is illegitimately drawing fuel from the special

Greedy/Needy cases, and the special claims of those who are badly off. Thus

Cohen says that “It might be objected that in characterizing the position of the

less well off as one of deprivation or want, I am unfairly tilting the balance against

the incentive argument”—because the incentives demanders are, in this case,

shown in a bad light: as insisting on getting large rewards in circumstances in

6

Andrew Williams [P&PA].




which others are very badly off. In response, he says: “Where the worst off are

not too badly off, it looks more fanatical to assign absolute priority to their claims.

But the stronger the case for ameliorating the situation of the badly off is, the

more discreditable (if I am right) the incentives argument is on the lips of the rich”

(ICI, 303). So incentive demands are especially objectionable in Greedy/Needy

cases, certainly more so than in Absolute Incentive or Large Dispersion

cases.

Reality? To conclude this sketch of the issues, I want to register a point on

which Cohen and I may disagree, though the point is about the world, not about

philosophy. I am not so sure that I agree with the suggestion—and it is a

suggestion rather than an argument—that the repulsive inequalities we now

observe in the United States and other advanced economies are incentive

inequalities of the kind under examination here—that they exist because the

possessors of scarce talents have high reservation wages, as a result of the

social ethos that dominates these societies. In the case of high reservation

wages, again, a person is genuinely unwilling to perform a task unless he or she

is highly compensated, that is, compensated in ways that make her better off

than others. Cohen calls this the standard case (PAI, 172-73), and he suggests

differences of social ethos provide a plausible explanation of current differences

in income dispersion between Germany and the United States, and of the

relatively limited dispersion in England in the early 1950s (WAI, 27). I have some

doubts.

7 David Estlund, “Liberalism, Equality, and Fraternity…”




Thus suppose contribution curve A lies higher than curve B at every point

from the origin. Then A (the higher curve) requires less inequality than B—

meaning a smaller range—to produce a specified advantage to the least

advantaged, and gives greater advantaged to the least advantaged for any

specified level of advantage to the better off. So Cohen claims that a failure to

raise the contribution curve from B to A would not, in Rawls’s view, amount to a

failure to make the society more just, because principles of justice apply to

institutions; they operate relative to a background of preferences and do not

assess the preferences themselves. So if the basic structure maximizes the

advantage of the least advantaged, given the regnant ethos—represented by

curve B—then the distribution is ipso facto just. “There is, Rawls would of course

readily agree, scope, within a just structure, for distribution affecting meanness

and generosity, but generosity, though it would alter the distribution, and might

make it more equal than it would otherwise be, could not make it more just than it

would otherwise be, for it would then be doing the impossible, to wit, enhancing

the justice of what is already established as a perfectly just distribution by virtue

merely of the just structure in conformity with which it is produced.”

In a similar vein, Cohen comments on a proposal by Ronald Dworkin that

a Rawlsian government might be charged with a duty, under the difference

principle, of promoting . . . an [equality-promoting] ethos” (WAI, 13) To which

Cohen responds the duty in question could not be imposed on grounds of justice,

because the distribution is just if the institutions are just, and since the ethos is

assumed not to be part of the institutional structure, an equality-enhancing

10 Discourse on Inequality , p. 195, emphasis added.




change of ethos does not affect the justice of the institutions, and therefore not

the justice of the distribution.

But this seems incorrect, for a straightforward reason: it might be that

changes in institutions and policies would change the distribution by raising the

contribution curve from B to A, and achieve that effect by changing the

preferences and attitudes that constitute the social ethos.11 Surely it could not be

that principles of justice that require us to adopt the institutions and policies that

make the greatest contribution to the least advantaged instruct us not to make

the changes when the effects on the least advantaged come from changes in the

social ethos that result from institutional changes. One way to raise the

contribution curve is to foster a wider distribution of marketable skills, thus

limiting the market power of possessors of scarce talents. But if, without

infringing basic liberties or limiting fair equality of opportunity, we can make

institutional changes that shift the ethos in a more solidaristic direction—raise the

contribution curve—then why shouldn’t such changes be required by justice?

Thus, consider two examples—both of which have at least a vague air of

plausibility, more than the usual air of philosophical examples—which suggest

that institutional changes may lift the contribution curve—reduce the extent of

inequality needed for improving the well-being of the least advantaged—by

changing the social ethos. Consider first Lijphart’s distinction between more

consensual and more majoritarian (Westminster-style) forms of democracy. In

more consensual forms, we have, inter alia, multiparty arrangements (typically

11 In an excellent (and as-yet) unpublished paper, Roxanne Fay argues this point with

considerable force. I have benefited greatly from reading her account and discussing it withher.




founded on proportional representation) with executive power sharing among the

parties, cooperation between legislative and executive, and coordinated

representation of interests; in addition, consensual systems have strong

federalism, judicial review, relatively rigid constitutions, strong bicameralism, and

independent central banks.12 Majoritarian democracies differ on each of these

dimensions. According to Lijphart, these differences in forms of democracy are

consequential: among other things, consensual democracies show stronger

political representation for women, greater economic inequality, and stronger

welfare states. I don’t want to wish to assess the evidence for these findings, or

whether the outcomes Lijphart considers are the right ones for evaluating forms

of democracy within justice as fairness. But they are at least suggestive.

Assuming, with Lijphart, that consensual and majoritarian democracies are both

capable of satisfying the first principle of justice, we might select a more

consensual form of democracy because it appears to be more suited to

advancing the requirements of fair equality and the difference principle that fall

under the second principle.

What is of particular relevance is the thought—not a wildly implausible

thought, though not one that is easy to demonstrate because of familiar

questions about direction of causation—that what underlies the association of

consensual democracy with a strong welfare state and greater economic equality

is that consensual political institutions shape the social ethos in the direction of

greater solidarity and social inclusion. So if we can improve the conditions of the

12 See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-

Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 16 on the differencesthat forms of democracy make.




by changing the social ethos—in particular, by reducing the incentives demanded

by the better off. If so, then justice requires the institutional changes, unless we

are prepared to say that the existing institutions are just because they “make the

most” of the existing preferences and attitudes. Cohen seems to disagree. He

says, for example, that the difference principle was better realized in Germany in

1988 than in the US because (roughly) wage dispersion was smaller in Germany.

But because the smaller dispersion was, Cohen assumes, a result of ethos not

law, Rawls cannot agree with this proposition about the relative justice of

Germany and the United States. Of course he clearly could say this if the

difference in ethos were the result of institutional differences.

With one qualification. I noted earlier than, in rejecting rigorism, Cohen

permits some incentive demands—some inequalities generated by permissible

self-interests. Whatever the permissible level, any smaller demands would

presumably also be permissible. So if some incentive demands are acceptable,

then it follows that there is an acceptable range of incentive demands. And if we

have an acceptable range, then we could have two systems, in one of which the

incentive demands are smaller than in the other, but both are within the

acceptable range. So suppose (improbably enough) that the German ethos and

the American ethos both give rise to incentive demands that lie within the

acceptable range. Then even if a shift in institutions led to a more solidaristic

ethos which in turn reduced the inequalities required to improve the

circumstances of the least advantaged, that institutional change might not be

required by justice. But that’s because the change of ethos would not produce a

more just distribution on any but an unacceptably rigorist view.




But this leaves a large question: what happens if the ethos—if attitudes

and preferences—are relatively unresponsive to institutions? I have said that if

changing institutions would improve the minimum at a lower level of inequality,

then justice requires the change, even if the effects are mediated by a change in

ethos: even if the principles apply to the institutions, justice would require

promoting the ethos that reduces incentives demands. But how general is this

case? Can we generally assume that objectionable forms of incentive demanding

behavior are responsive to institutions?

4. The Four Bad Cases

To address this question, I propose to focus on the four bad cases I sketched

earlier: Ascriptive Preferences, Class Preferences, Greed/Needy, and Large

Dispersion. I believe (and will indicate along the way some reasons for

believing) that Rawls thinks (rightly) that incentives paid in response to such

preferences are objectionable: the inequalities that flow from acceding to such

incentive demands are intuitively objectionable, so we would not be in reflective

equilibrium if our conception of justice permitted them. But it does not follow that

they must be condemned directly by a principle of justice. The important point is

that, in a just society, inequalities of the objectionable kinds do not emerge. And

if they don’t, then principles formulated for institutions will suffice.

So there are two related strategies for responding to these cases,

corresponding to two reasons for thinking that institutions provide the




fundamental focus of principles of justice.14 A first reason is that institutions play

a large role in shaping economic and political outcomes, given preferences: what

is of special relevance in the current context is the thought that arrangements

associated with achieving fair equality of opportunity—social investment in

human capital, wide dispersion of capital—will address some of the troubling

cases. The second reason is that institutions play a large role in shaping a

society’s culture and the identity of members: “But what about the character and

interests of individuals themselves. These are not fixed or given. A theory of

justice must take into account how the aims and aspirations of people are

formed; and doing this belongs to the wider framework of thought in the light of

which a conception of justice is to be explained.” Rawls continues that “an

economic regime . . . is not only an institutional scheme for satisfying existing

desires and aspirations but a way of fashioning desires and aspirations in the

future. More generally, the basic structure shapes the way the social system

produces and reproduces over time a certain form of culture shared by persons

with certain conceptions of their good.”15

Consider how these two considerations—two aspects of the importance of

social arrangements—bear on the four objectionable cases introduced earlier. In

the cases of preferences for relative advantage—whether Ascriptive or Class—

the expectation is that two factors will limits the presence of such preferences in

a society in which the institutions satisfy the principles. First, members of a just

14 In the “Basic Structure,” Rawls discusses these two considerations in sections 4 and 5

respectively. The second considerations, having to do with the effects of social arrangementson identity and culture, is not mentioned in Theory of Justice in the initial discussion of whythe focus of the theory is the basic structure (see p. 7), though it is introduced later, at p. 229,in the account of justice and political economy. For discussoin of the two distinct reasons, see

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement , pp. 52-57.




society, with equal rights, will acquire the conception of one another as equals,

and this will limit the role of specifically ascriptive preferences, which are founded

on views about the lesser significance of people who belong to certain groups

and a corresponding sense of entitlement with respect to those groups.

Moreover, second, preferences for relative advantage more generally—

even if not of the ascriptive kind—should play a limited role. Rawls, recall,

derives principles of justice on the assumption that people care about their

absolute score, not their relative score in the distribution of resources: parties in

the original position do not “try to gain relative to each other.”16 Thus individuals

are assumed, for example, not to be given to envy (if they are less well-off), or to

grudgingess (if they are better off). But to show that this assumption, made for

the purposes of choosing principles, is reasonable we need to show that people

in a society with just institutions will not be prone to concern about their relative

situation. And here the idea is that equal standing as citizens provides support for

self-respect independent of relative standing in the distribution of income, so long

as the income dispersion is not too great. Concerns about relative standing arise

from concerns about respect, about how one is valued by others; in particular,

they reflect a lack of assured respect from others: but the presence of basic

liberties and fair equality provides that respect: “self-respect is secured by the

public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all….”17 And this, if true,

substantially diminishes attention to relative shares.

15 “Basic Structure,” in Political Liberalism, p. 269.16

Theory of Justice, p. 125.17 Theory of Justice, 478.




What about Large Dispersion? Large dispersion cases are assumed to

be taken care of by the condition of fair equality of opportunity. “[B]oth the

absolute and the relative differences allowed in a well-ordered society are

probably less than those that have often prevailed. Although in theory the

difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in return for small gains

to the less favored, the spread of income and wealth should not be excessive in

practice, given requisite background institutions.”18 Intuitively, the idea is that

large investments in education and training will substantially increase the supply

of skills, thus limiting both the bargaining power of the possessors of scarce skills

who are prepared to take more than their reservation wage—and the capacity of

persons who have high reservation wages to command those wages: “The idea

is that given the equal basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity, the open

competition between the greater numbers of the well-trained and better educated

reduces the ratio of shares until it lies within the acceptable range…. With

background institutions of fair equality, the open competition between the greater

numbers of the well-trained and the better educated reduces the ration of shares

until it lies in the acceptable range.”19 The idea is that the “advantaged cannot

unite as a group and then exploit their market power to force increases in their

income.”20

And if this is wrong? Then you need to “reconsider the soundness of

the difference principle.”21

As to the Greedy/Needy cases: surely they are objectionable if Large

Dispersion cases are objectionable. A large dispersion in a population that

18 Ibid., p. 470.

19 Restatement , p. 67.20

Ibid.21 Ibid, note 35.




includes people in conditions of “want” is plainly worse than a large dispersion in

a population all of whose members are at least moderately well-off. Those who

are less well-off can certainly reasonably object to the demandingness of the

advantaged, and to the resulting inequalities. Here, again, the expectation is that

the objectionable inequalities will be taken care of in part by reducing the

bargaining power of the greedy through the dispersion of skills. In addition, the

human capital investments designed to ensure fair equality should improve the

capacity of the less well-off to succeed in the labor market.

I do not intend here to assess the plausibility of these views. Instead I offer

them to show that it is entirely consistent with the Rawlsian version of

egalitarianism to affirm that social ethos matters to distributive justice. Rather

than denying the relevance of the social ethos, the claim is that preferences and

attitudes that would lead to objectionable distributions were they in place are

either not likely to arise within just institutions because of the educative effects of

those institutions, or will not have their objectionable effects once the other

principles of justice are in place, because of the broad dispersion of human and

non-human capital. To be sure, Rawls does not consider what we ought to do—

what conclusions about principles of justice we should draw—in the face of an

ethos that generates unacceptable distributions and is recalcitrant to address

through changes in laws and policies. But that’s not because an account of

justice is to take preferences as given, and to live with their effects, whatever

they are. Instead, the claim is that such cases are unlikely to arise precisely

because preferences and attitudes are so influenced by institutions—that the

social ethos is important, but so pervasively shaped by institutions and the




political culture that is does not require indepedent treatment by principles of

justice.

5. Conclusion

I fear that the argument of the paper may come across as an overly subtle

defense of Rawls. I feel the force of the objection, but want to resist it, principally

by underscoring that the argument I have presented is a defense only in a pretty

attenuated sense of the term.

Here is a way to take the conclusion: we can be egalitarians and endorse

a political conception of justice whose principles focus on the basic structure and

its institutions if but (arguably) only if we are prepared to endorse a fairly strong

set of assumptions about how social arrangements work: assumptions about the

pervasive influence of social institutions on political-economic outcomes and on

culture and identity. If we don’t think we can substantially reduce income

dispersion by investing lots in education and training, and by keeping the

ownership of other forms of capital widely dispersed, then we will have to face

Large Dispersion and Greedy/Needy cases. And if we don’t think, with

Rousseau and Rawls, that ensuring a decent standard of living and equality of

basic liberties leads people to downplay concerns about their relative position—

to invest less of their identity in their standing relative to others, and more in their

success in pursuing a plan of life—then we will need to face Ascriptive Group

and Class Preference cases. In saying this, I do not mean to be saying anything

that Rawls would deny or find surprising: indeed, a central part of his view—and

a topic of much of Cohen’s current critical energies in his work on




constructivism—is that an account of justice belongs to a “wider framework of

thought in the light of which a conception of justice is to be explained.” That

framework of thought includes substantive, arguably deep, but contingent truths

about human beings and social cooperation—perhaps hopeful assumptions,

articles of reasonable faith that are consistent with the rest of our empirical

knowledge. In any case, those truths, as Rawls presents them, assign a large

role to social institutions in shaping outcomes, identities, and aspirations.

If we endorse those views, then we don’t need to have principles that

address the Four Cases because they simply can be expected not to arise. We

need not have anything definite to say about what we would do if the satisfaction

of the difference principle leads to Wide Dispersion or Greedy/Needy problems,

despite the full realization of fair equality of opportunity. All we can say in

advance is that if they did arise, we would not be in reflective equilibrium, and

something would have to give.

On the other hand, if we reject the substantive assumptions that Rawls

endorses, then we have, I think, two principal options. We can preserve political

liberalism, with its focus on basic institutions, but then we will need to give up on

any strong formulation of egalitarianism because we will locate the social ethos

outside the scope of our conception of justice: taking preferences and attitudes

as given, we will likely be led—assuming we endorse the difference principle—to

accept Large Dispersion and Greedy/Needy inequalities.

Or we can preserve our egalitarianism, and extend the scope of our views

of justice outside the arena of institutions to include the social ethos. That outlook

may seem worrisome—to invite political regulation of private social attitudes. But




such worries are misguided, for two reasons. First, whether attitudes count as

private and inappropriate as an object of public concern is not something we can

decide prior to our views about what justice requires. “The spheres of the political

and the public, of the nonpublic and the private, fall out from the content and

application of the conception of justice and its principles. If the so-called private

sphere is alleged to be a space exempt from justice, then there is no such

thing.”22 The thesis that a decision is private, and ought not therefore to be

regulated except for especially compelling reasons, is not best understood as a

premise in normative political argument—because the decision is private, we

should not regulate it—but as a conclusion of such argument.

But more fundamentally, it is entirely open to the egalitarian to deny that

that it would be either good or even possible to produce the relevant changes in

social ethos by authoritative political means. Instead what is needed may be a

direct assault on the ruling social ethos through cultural criticism and other tools

available in what Habermas calls the “informal public sphere”—including

expressions of disgust for “the handful of powerful and rich men [who live] at the

pinnacle of greatness and fortune while the mass crawls in obscurity and misery,”

open contempt for the publicists and intellectuals who celebrate a culture of

greed in a world of pain, unbridled hostility for craven silence in the face of

organized degradation and humiliation, along with constructive reminders of the

possibility of living well while living a minimally decent life.

22 “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” University of Chicago Law Review.

joshua cohen. incentive on cohen.pdf

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