Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality by Joseph de la Torre Dwyer

Author:Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030211264
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6. Liberty and Just Deserts: Slaves, Dynasties, and Moral Agents

Joseph de la Torre Dwyer1

(1)Independent Scholar, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Joseph de la Torre Dwyer

Email: [email protected]

Now that I have described the ways in which the Just Deserts proposal realizes the core underlying need of the principle of efficiency, I would like to discuss how it may satisfy proponents of another principle of distributive justice: liberty.

Attractive accounts of liberty often require a process of consent based upon a right of self-ownership, “where such a right consists of robust and stringent rights of control over oneself: one’s mind, body, and life.”1 I argue in this chapter that the Just Deserts proposal, by allowing such property rights in oneself in addition to property rights to all of the income that one can gain from one’s autonomous effort, can simply, accurately, and coherently maximize liberty. The stakes of this claim are important, for if it is true that libertarianism has unnecessarily and improperly extended liberty to mean property rights to all of the income that one can gain from certain portions of one’s endowment, then the Just Deserts proposal can make a strong case that distributive justice does not infringe upon individual liberty.

A distributive justice principle of liberty is attractive to many because it protects the individual from (a large class of) outcomes dependent upon others’ autonomous effort to which the individual did not offer consent. As the reader might fear that the Just Deserts proposal runs roughshod over individual liberty in an effort to redistribute, there are two potential objections to Just Deserts from the principle of liberty that I would like to address in this chapter. First, many modern liberals are perfectly comfortable with taxes but reject lump-sum endowment taxes as described in the last chapter—allegedly this constitutes illegitimate coercion or force in a way that typical income taxes do not. Second, although few are committed to the moral monism of exclusively valuing liberty as the one ethical principle of any value, libertarianism seems to reject all taxes in principle and has a growing following as systemic inequality simultaneously reaches its most exaggerated levels. Libertarians generally argue that, today, only outcomes agreed to by valid consent may produce distributive justice. Distributive justice is then allegedly measured in the eyes of the libertarian by observing a process that excludes certain kinds of taxes rather than by observing the distribution itself.

I hope to show in this section why liberals and libertarians would be at least as well, if not better, served by the Just Deserts proposal as it best fulfills a liberal impulse that each person be the unalloyed master of his or her place in the social distribution—that each individual freely decides whether they will be the poorest or richest member of society.2

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