I understand that I am supposed to be arguing the opposite from Will’s position. This is in some sense impossible, because Will is a sophist who refuses to acknowledge his sophistry, and who therefore claims to embrace propositions that he in fact rejects. In the present case, Will might say that he agrees with the proposition if only you grant him his favored interpretation of “equal,” “opportunity,” “distribution,” and “justice.” And then we shall be astonished to see the Sun rising in the West.
That said, we do need to interpret these terms. What does it mean for opportunities to be equal?
Our interest in equality of opportunity rests on a shared moral intuition of general opportunities that must be open to us in order to have the prospects of a good and meaningul life. We don’t mean equality of opportunity to join in ecstatic union with Jessica Alba. But we might mean equality of opportunity to join in ecstatic union with someone or other. In my way of thinking, the opportunities with moral weight are opportunities to realize basic human capacities, potentialities, or “capabilities.” This is an approach associated with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.
Before I say more, let me say that on most days I agree with Will that equality of opportunity to compete for the nth position in the income distribution is incoherent. It makes no more sense than does equality of opportunity to compete for a starting position on the US men’s Olympic team. We all begin with different potentialities which are a function of our genetic endowments. Simply in virtue of my lineage I never had an opportunity to be competitive in basketball at a high level. No matter how many resources had been devoted to the development of my basketball capacities, my relative position in the distribution of basketball skill would never rise much above average. The Olympic team is reserved for people at a certain exalted level in the distribution of skill. And that level is closed to me due to the constraints of my physical constitution. There are opportunities that we do not have in virtue of what we are, and they cannot be equalized.
Likewise, the nth position in the income distribution might be closed to me due to irremediable aspects of the physical order. It therefore makes no sense to worry about equal opportunity to achieve the nth position. What makes sense is equal opportunity to develop the capacities that in large part account for your position. If the best I could do, if my capacities are fully realized, is position n-1,000,000, then that’s the best I can do. This gets us close to our principle of equal opportunity.
To be precise and convincing, however, it is necessary to point out that it remains highly miseading to speak of competition for positions along various dimensions, especially the dimension of income. For our position in the income distribution is not much up to us. It is largely a function of demand in the labor market. (It is partly up to us insofar as our choices take the labor market into account. The choice between lawyer and professor is a choice, among other things, between different likely ranges of future income. Professors who complain that they do not make as much as lawyers are not complaining about their access to higher incomes–they could have been lawyers, but chose not to be. They are complaining about the tradeoffs defined by the interaction of their preferences and demand in the labor market.) In a society with our contingent history, in which Naismith happened to invent basketball, there exists a labor market which rewards some individuals who in every other possible labor market in which basketball did not exist would lack the capacity to reach the median position. That is to say, an individual’s top possible position relative to their capacities can vary by orders of magnitude based on a single other individual’s discoveries, inventions, or initiatives. This complicates matters a great deal. My relative position given ideally realized capacities may be a matter of whether others do or do not realize theirs, or a matter of the degree to which they do.
The interdepence of the utility of capacities pushes us to recognize the primacy of the most general and necessary capacities. I will not make a list here. But I have in mind those capacities the development of which is necessary to effectively pursue one’s good, whatever that may be. Call these primary capacities.
We edge closer. We must all have the equal opportunity to realize our primary capacities. But realize to what extent? I think that the differential realization of capacities is not something subject to institutional manipulation. I don’t think we can provide equal opportunity to maximally realize our capacities. The attempt to do so would hurt more than help, so we should be content with realization that is adequate. Adequate to what end? Adequate to enable each person to be a full participant in productive cooperation and to achieve their reasonable, meaningful ends.
So, here’s our principle:
A just society will distribute opportunities so that each person has an equal opportunity to adequately realize their primary capacities.
Our society manifestly fails this principle. Now, my problem was not to lay out a set of policies that I believe will rectify this failure. Let me just say something brief about how we would justify the reallocation of wealth in order to ensure that our society satisfies the principle of equal opportunity.
As I mentioned earlier, the utility of capacities is radically interdependent. The economic value of one person’s realized capacities may be a function of the realization of other person’s capacities. Now, in a generally cooperative context, the development of one person’s capacities enhances the asbolute value (but not necessarily the relative value) of other persons’ capacities. Which is just to say, a person’s realized capacities generally produces positive externalities. Whether they do in a specific case is a question of how a person’s capacities are are expressed through their agency. But in a cooperative context, the incentives will create a general tendency for people to choose to express their capacities in productive ways.
Now, people who either would be participants, or would be more productive participants, in the network of cooperation if only their capacities were adequately realized, represent lost value to the network of cooperation. The realization of this pool of capacities is a classic public good. We would each be better off if they were realized, but we will individually underinvest in them. If there is an amount that we could reallocate to the development of primary capacities that is smaller than the value that would thereby be created by the productive expression of those capacities in the cooperative network, then we should reallocate it. Because the value of these adequately realized capacities is likely very high, we should be willing to reallocate a very large amount to the task. A subsidy that will produce benefits greater than the cost of the subsidy is smart and just, especially if the subsidy is funded, and its benefits are distributed, in a fair way, such that each person can see herself as a winner in the overall transaction.
In order to establish that equality of opportunity as I have characterized it is the central principle of distributive justice, I would need to say more about why a number of other principles are not. But I think I have said enough to indicate why I might think that equality of actual material holdings, or equality of opportunity to positions in the wealth distribution, or mere formal equality as citizens with regard to the laws, are unattractive alternatives.
I have gone on too long. I’m not comfortable in this format. However, I may be willing to address questions in the comments if they are well-framed, and politely addressed. And, since I’ve framed an argument that is designed to be appealing to Will, I wonder what he thinks is wrong with it, if anything. Perhaps some readers will wish to conjecture.
Liam,
How would you answer Schmidtz closing question from the Cato discussion on inequality? Do “we” have the moral authority to coercively re-arrange resources to achieve the “just society” you outline?
Liam,
How would you answer Schmidtz closing question from the Cato discussion on inequality? Do “we” have the moral authority to coercively re-arrange resources to achieve the “just society” you outline?
If our purpose is just to move resources around in order to equalize holdings, then no.
My argument, in a nutshell, is that the adequate development of everyone’s primary capacities is a public good, and that only the state can provide it. Think of it as investment in the infrastructure of the network of productive cooperation. If the state is legitimate at all, then so is reallocation for the purpose of meeting the principle of equal opportunity.
If our purpose is just to move resources around in order to equalize holdings, then no.
My argument, in a nutshell, is that the adequate development of everyone’s primary capacities is a public good, and that only the state can provide it. Think of it as investment in the infrastructure of the network of productive cooperation. If the state is legitimate at all, then so is reallocation for the purpose of meeting the principle of equal opportunity.
Liam,
Well, I think I understood that much. But the “public good” argument would only be adequate if you already believe that “we” have the moral authority to correct market failures and maximize “economic efficiency”.
If that is the case, then there is no reason you shouldn’t (in principal) object to moving resources to equalize holdings. If “relative income pollution” existed, as economists like Richard Layard have argued, then “we” would be similarly justified in re-distributing resources to equalize holdings.
The only difference is where you talk about positive externalities, Layard talks about negative externalities. Do you think both arguments have equal moral weight? Is you disagreement with Layard strictly empirical?
Liam,
Well, I think I understood that much. But the “public good” argument would only be adequate if you already believe that “we” have the moral authority to correct market failures and maximize “economic efficiency”.
If that is the case, then there is no reason you shouldn’t (in principal) object to moving resources to equalize holdings. If “relative income pollution” existed, as economists like Richard Layard have argued, then “we” would be similarly justified in re-distributing resources to equalize holdings.
The only difference is where you talk about positive externalities, Layard talks about negative externalities. Do you think both arguments have equal moral weight? Is you disagreement with Layard strictly empirical?
***EDITED FOR CLARITY***
Liam,
Well, I think I understood that much. But the “public good” argument would only be adequate if you already believe that “we” have the moral authority to correct market failures and maximize “economic efficiency”. If that is the case, then there is no reason you shouldn’t (in principal) object to moving resources to equalize holdings.
For example, if Richard Layard’s “relative income pollution” existed, then “we” might have a similar problem of failing to meet our goal of “economic efficiency”. If this is the case, what is stopping us from imposing higher taxes on income(as Layard suggests)or even redistributing from rich to poor?
The only difference is that where you talk about positive externalities, Layard talks about negative externalities. Do you think both arguments have equal moral weight? Is you disagreement with Layard strictly empirical?
***EDITED FOR CLARITY***
Liam,
Well, I think I understood that much. But the “public good” argument would only be adequate if you already believe that “we” have the moral authority to correct market failures and maximize “economic efficiency”. If that is the case, then there is no reason you shouldn’t (in principal) object to moving resources to equalize holdings.
For example, if Richard Layard’s “relative income pollution” existed, then “we” might have a similar problem of failing to meet our goal of “economic efficiency”. If this is the case, what is stopping us from imposing higher taxes on income(as Layard suggests)or even redistributing from rich to poor?
The only difference is that where you talk about positive externalities, Layard talks about negative externalities. Do you think both arguments have equal moral weight? Is you disagreement with Layard strictly empirical?
Liam,
If we all knew what our capacities were, we would not have any drive to find our limit, or to even wonder what our limit was. I think that your idealized world, while perhaps optimal in distribution of labor and resources, would be rather like Hell, because no one would have any hope, and only the people at the top of each capacity tree would have incentives to reach the perfection of their skills. If, across all possible paths, the best I could ever hope to do was to be the world’s 3 millionth best software programmer, then what you have told me is that despite my best intentions and effort, my impact on the world will be essentially zero. A public good? I would call your proposal a public evil.
Luckily, your proposed measurements cannot be made, so we are left to live lives of wonderful ignorance, striving to find ways to improve ourselves, hoping that we might “make it big”, despite the fact that more often than not, it will never happen.
I am struck by how similar your idealized world sounds like the world of IT in ‘A Wrinkle In Time’. IT’s world was perfectly organized by capacity as well, if I recall correctly.
I hope I was sufficiently polite in my dissent
Liam,
If we all knew what our capacities were, we would not have any drive to find our limit, or to even wonder what our limit was. I think that your idealized world, while perhaps optimal in distribution of labor and resources, would be rather like Hell, because no one would have any hope, and only the people at the top of each capacity tree would have incentives to reach the perfection of their skills. If, across all possible paths, the best I could ever hope to do was to be the world’s 3 millionth best software programmer, then what you have told me is that despite my best intentions and effort, my impact on the world will be essentially zero. A public good? I would call your proposal a public evil.
Luckily, your proposed measurements cannot be made, so we are left to live lives of wonderful ignorance, striving to find ways to improve ourselves, hoping that we might “make it big”, despite the fact that more often than not, it will never happen.
I am struck by how similar your idealized world sounds like the world of IT in ‘A Wrinkle In Time’. IT’s world was perfectly organized by capacity as well, if I recall correctly.
I hope I was sufficiently polite in my dissent
Liam, it is fortunate that your task was not to lay out a set of policies that would allow society to distribute opportunities so that each person has an equal opportunity to adequately realize their primary capacities, because I don’t think that you could do it. This is not a personal failing of yours (I think you’re more fit for sharing your ideas in this format than you seem to realize – not that I’m any sort of expert), but a result of an impossible task. Any writing that came close to succeeding at laying out those policies would have to be placed on the fiction shelves, as it would have only strained connections to our world. In the real world, I doubt that any central planners would do better than a vibrant, thriving free market economy, of the sort that Will is always going on about. If hundreds of millions of creative agents, interacting and cooperating in the production of their meaningful lives, do not live up to your ideal of equal opportunity for primary capacity realization, then what makes you think that we could improve on their efforts by bringing in the coercive power of the state? This is especially true if we look beyond our own narrow, artificial “society”. The kind of productivity and growth created by a more libertarian society will have enormous spillover benefits to people in the rest of the world (outside of what we mark off as “our society”) and to the people of the future, giving them a much better opportunity to realize their primary capacities than they would have had if our society turned inward and focused on redistribution rather than growth.
You seem to suggest that this productivity argument would be mistaken, since redistribution of wealth designed as an investment in primary capacities would more than pay for itself through increased productivity. You happily assume that a government, formed out of a conglomeration of individuals with competing interests and a limited understanding of the very complicated and massive network of cooperation depending on humanity capacities, would be able to improve this system by fiat. I don’t think I need to spell out in any more detail why I might be skeptical.
The problem becomes more acute once we recognize, as you seemingly acknowledge by omission, that it’s an open question what these primary capacities actually are. It is up for dispute, as it rightfully should be in an open, liberal society, given the weightiness of the question and its close relation to personal values and identity.
It also seems like a fetishization of equality to limit our attention to the “primary capacities”, which are accessible to everyone, and necessary to everyone for the realization of one’s good. The capacity to excel in basketball, or in art, or in humor, or in philospohy, may not be open to everyone, but there is an enormous value to a society in which different people are able to excel at diverse capacities. Think of Naismith’s wondrously beneficial innovation – it is so valuable because it allowed a set of individuals who otherwise would not have had any particularly striking talents to thrive in a new niche. Instead of letting “equality” stifle us into more efficiently pursuing the same old potentialities, let’s create a society where innovation allows us to recognize potentialities that we’d never known before. We want a society in which more and more capacities become relevant, and become pathways to success, excellence, and meaning, so that larger and larger portions of society are able to flourish in multifarious ways. Devoting an enormous set of resources to allowing everyone to “adequately” develop that limited set of common capacities so that their lives may reach that minimum standard of meaningfulness will not help us create this thriving society. The society that is most effective at driving this kind of innovation and diversification of meaningful pursuits, again, looks a lot like Will’s libertarian paradise.
I hope that this comment has come across as polite, since I’m glad you’ve jumped into the fray here, Liam (and I’m a bit excited/nervous/apprehensive about jumping into the fray myself). I know that it won’t come across as a well-framed question, because it obviously is not, but I hope you’ll be able to offer a response, since I’m interested in hearing what you have to say.
Liam, it is fortunate that your task was not to lay out a set of policies that would allow society to distribute opportunities so that each person has an equal opportunity to adequately realize their primary capacities, because I don’t think that you could do it. This is not a personal failing of yours (I think you’re more fit for sharing your ideas in this format than you seem to realize – not that I’m any sort of expert), but a result of an impossible task. Any writing that came close to succeeding at laying out those policies would have to be placed on the fiction shelves, as it would have only strained connections to our world. In the real world, I doubt that any central planners would do better than a vibrant, thriving free market economy, of the sort that Will is always going on about. If hundreds of millions of creative agents, interacting and cooperating in the production of their meaningful lives, do not live up to your ideal of equal opportunity for primary capacity realization, then what makes you think that we could improve on their efforts by bringing in the coercive power of the state? This is especially true if we look beyond our own narrow, artificial “society”. The kind of productivity and growth created by a more libertarian society will have enormous spillover benefits to people in the rest of the world (outside of what we mark off as “our society”) and to the people of the future, giving them a much better opportunity to realize their primary capacities than they would have had if our society turned inward and focused on redistribution rather than growth.
You seem to suggest that this productivity argument would be mistaken, since redistribution of wealth designed as an investment in primary capacities would more than pay for itself through increased productivity. You happily assume that a government, formed out of a conglomeration of individuals with competing interests and a limited understanding of the very complicated and massive network of cooperation depending on humanity capacities, would be able to improve this system by fiat. I don’t think I need to spell out in any more detail why I might be skeptical.
The problem becomes more acute once we recognize, as you seemingly acknowledge by omission, that it’s an open question what these primary capacities actually are. It is up for dispute, as it rightfully should be in an open, liberal society, given the weightiness of the question and its close relation to personal values and identity.
It also seems like a fetishization of equality to limit our attention to the “primary capacities”, which are accessible to everyone, and necessary to everyone for the realization of one’s good. The capacity to excel in basketball, or in art, or in humor, or in philospohy, may not be open to everyone, but there is an enormous value to a society in which different people are able to excel at diverse capacities. Think of Naismith’s wondrously beneficial innovation – it is so valuable because it allowed a set of individuals who otherwise would not have had any particularly striking talents to thrive in a new niche. Instead of letting “equality” stifle us into more efficiently pursuing the same old potentialities, let’s create a society where innovation allows us to recognize potentialities that we’d never known before. We want a society in which more and more capacities become relevant, and become pathways to success, excellence, and meaning, so that larger and larger portions of society are able to flourish in multifarious ways. Devoting an enormous set of resources to allowing everyone to “adequately” develop that limited set of common capacities so that their lives may reach that minimum standard of meaningfulness will not help us create this thriving society. The society that is most effective at driving this kind of innovation and diversification of meaningful pursuits, again, looks a lot like Will’s libertarian paradise.
I hope that this comment has come across as polite, since I’m glad you’ve jumped into the fray here, Liam (and I’m a bit excited/nervous/apprehensive about jumping into the fray myself). I know that it won’t come across as a well-framed question, because it obviously is not, but I hope you’ll be able to offer a response, since I’m interested in hearing what you have to say.
Liam,
I suspect that you would have to agree with me that the costs and benefits that you have discussed are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to measure accurately.
How does your theory address the inevitable errors in redistributive policies?
For example, what if (as I suspect) the marginal benefit of spending an additional billion dollars on primary public schools does not actually exceed its costs? Then you will have immorally (I think) obstructed many people’s pursuit of their potentials.
At least in Will’s world, those who misallocate resources only hurt themselves (and others who willingly cooperate with their schemes). And, they will likely improve their theories after each mistake and will do better next time. Perhaps the investment in public goods will be suboptimal, but optimal investment in public goods in unavailable to human beings with imperfect knowledge.
In your world, there will be a bureaucracy that will systematically victimize innocents and will be unlikely to even recognize its mistakes in many cases, let alone learn from them and improve its behavior.
So, I ask you: Even if a perfectly designed and executed restributive policy would be just, why should anyone think that an imperfect one executed by fallible human beings would be just?
Liam,
I suspect that you would have to agree with me that the costs and benefits that you have discussed are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to measure accurately.
How does your theory address the inevitable errors in redistributive policies?
For example, what if (as I suspect) the marginal benefit of spending an additional billion dollars on primary public schools does not actually exceed its costs? Then you will have immorally (I think) obstructed many people’s pursuit of their potentials.
At least in Will’s world, those who misallocate resources only hurt themselves (and others who willingly cooperate with their schemes). And, they will likely improve their theories after each mistake and will do better next time. Perhaps the investment in public goods will be suboptimal, but optimal investment in public goods in unavailable to human beings with imperfect knowledge.
In your world, there will be a bureaucracy that will systematically victimize innocents and will be unlikely to even recognize its mistakes in many cases, let alone learn from them and improve its behavior.
So, I ask you: Even if a perfectly designed and executed restributive policy would be just, why should anyone think that an imperfect one executed by fallible human beings would be just?
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Will,
What are some of the problems with Liam’s argument you havn’t seen mentioned here?
Will,
What are some of the problems with Liam’s argument you havn’t seen mentioned here?
The libertarian critique of central planning has come to baffle me. I mean, the twentieth century did, admittedly, see some regimes that claimed to be responsible for everything in society. But the libertarian critique of these regimes is not only that they failed spectacularly, but also that there claims to omnipotence were totally bogus.
So, once we’re all on the same page about the impossibility of central planning, why can’t we outline a framework for what goals our country should persue (e.g. equal cultivation of individual capacities) without assuming that bringing this about is uniquely the province of governmental institutions.
This doesn’t mean that libertarians are right when they say that government should not be involved AT ALL in helping us reach our goals. Much less does it mean that, as many comments suggest, we should refrain from even discussing our goals out of fear of what government might do if it tried to help us prsue them.
The libertarian critique of central planning has come to baffle me. I mean, the twentieth century did, admittedly, see some regimes that claimed to be responsible for everything in society. But the libertarian critique of these regimes is not only that they failed spectacularly, but also that there claims to omnipotence were totally bogus.
So, once we’re all on the same page about the impossibility of central planning, why can’t we outline a framework for what goals our country should persue (e.g. equal cultivation of individual capacities) without assuming that bringing this about is uniquely the province of governmental institutions.
This doesn’t mean that libertarians are right when they say that government should not be involved AT ALL in helping us reach our goals. Much less does it mean that, as many comments suggest, we should refrain from even discussing our goals out of fear of what government might do if it tried to help us prsue them.