Really, Burn After Reading

Since there hasn't been any fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy here for a while, I present to you, some fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy! As regular readers may remember, my doctorate is perhaps frighteningly obsessed - notice how I put distance between the mental states of what is after all a piece of writing, and those of its creator - with G. A. Cohen's attacks on Rawls. Those attacks began by observing that Rawls' difference principle, which legitimates inequalities in income and wealth (roughly) that maximize the income and wealth of those who have the least income and wealth, seems to treat the intentions of those who would recieve the proposed inequalities as fixed. They blossom into a whole host of variously methodological and conceptual attacks, but it all starts with that observation, and the claim that that shows that at least the levels of inequality Rawls thought were justified by it are not, that in fact it legitimates very little inequality.

The idea is that like a kidnapper who demands that you pay up, or the kid gets it, ignoring the fact that it's them that makes it true that the kid gets it, Rawls' economically productive, instead of just producing as much as they could, ask for incentives to do so even though they could make more without the incentives. Like the kidnapper, that paying them will produce a good outcome is dependent on their will. Someone asking for medical treatment is usually going to be ill whether or not they decide to be ill, but how much they work is something people have control over. Cohen then says that a productive egalitarian ethos is a demand of justice, since it will increase the take of the well-off, roughly (more technically, for any given level of output that could be achieved by providing financial incentives to the productive, there is a more egalitarian distribution in which the productive are not so incentivised, and the least well-off have larger holdings, a distribution achievable if the productive have a productive egalitarian ethos).

Now, I think this kind of thing is totally crazy, mostly because I think that there are good reasons for thinking that the justice of distributions of property rights ought to be sorted out by features of systems of property rights, rather than people's motivations, and particularly their motivations about how much and at what to work. Leaving people space to live their lives is, on reflection, a more or less foundational requirement of just political systems, and if you have to take decisions about which job to do at what rate of pay on the basis of how it'll effect the distribution of property throughout your society, that requirement is not met.

But that's by the by here. The fiddly, inconsequential bit of political philosophy concerns Cohen's claim that a productive egalitarian ethos would not limit people's freedom. Cohen argues this on the grounds that moral demands in general are limits on freedom or are in general not, and so it can't be an argument against any particular moral demand that it limits freedom. It could be an argument against a law that it limits freedom, since laws coerce people, but it's not an argument against a moral demand, and the ethos is a moral demand, which he doesn't call for the legal enforcement of. This may or may not be true in general, and it doesn't matter for my argument against Cohen's position, which is that the demand is too demanding and so different from a claim about freedom. However, I think I can show that Cohen is wrong about whether or not the ethos limits a potentially significant freedom.

More or less ex hypothesi for Cohen, a society's coercive legal structures cannot distribute stuff justly: people's behaviour within those structures matters, which is why he thinks that an ethos is a requirement of justice. That means that whether or not one is complicit in injustice is going to be dependent on people's choices within coercive structures: so far as Cohen's concerned, it is only if other people chose to follow the demands of the productive egalitarian ethos, for example, that I can avoid living under a set of institutions which end up distributing stuff in a way which treats people unjustly. Obviously, in order to make his argument that the ethos does not limit freedom, Cohen has to insist that the ethos cannot be a legal requirement: indeed, otherwise it wouldn't be choice within a society's coercive legal structures. That means, though, that I have a positive right to not meet the demands of the ethos, that no-one can force me to meet the demands of the ethos. Unless everyone does meet the demands of the ethos though, for Cohen our society will be unjust: when the law prevents people from forcing each other to meet the demands of the ethos, it prevents them from making their society just. Cohen's ethos then does conflict with a certain freedom, the freedom to live in a just society. If Cohen's right, then even the best possible legal system may coercively prevent me from having to live in a society which distributes goods unjustly.