Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel

Author:Michael Sandel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 0374532508
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

An Egalitarian Nightmare

“Harrison Bergeron,” a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., plays out this worry as dystopian science fiction. “The year was 2081,” the story begins, “and everybody was finally equal… Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” This thoroughgoing equality was enforced by agents of the United States Handicapper General. Citizens of above average intelligence were required to wear mental handicap radios in their ears. Every twenty seconds or so, a government transmitter would send out a sharp noise to prevent them “from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”15

Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen, is unusually smart, handsome, and gifted, and so has to be fitted with heavier handicaps than most. Instead of the little ear radio, “he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses.” To disguise his good looks, Harrison is required to wear “a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.” And to offset his physical strength, he has to walk around wearing heavy scrap metal. “In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.”16

One day, Harrison sheds his handicaps in an act of heroic defiance against the egalitarian tyranny. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the conclusion. It should already be clear how Vonnegut’s story makes vivid a familiar complaint against egalitarian theories of justice.

Rawls’s theory of justice, however, is not open to that objection. He shows that a leveling equality is not the only alternative to a meritocratic market society. Rawls’s alternative, which he calls the difference principle, corrects for the unequal distribution of talents and endowments without handicapping the talented. How? Encourage the gifted to develop and exercise their talents, but with the understanding that the rewards these talents reap in the market belong to the community as a whole. Don’t handicap the best runners; let them run and do their best. Simply acknowledge in advance that the winnings don’t belong to them alone, but should be shared with those who lack similar gifts.

Although the difference principle does not require an equal distribution of income and wealth, its underlying idea expresses a powerful, even inspiring vision of equality:

The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. But it does not follow that one should eliminate these distinctions.

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