The Theology of Liberalism by Eric Nelson

Author:Eric Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

CHAPTER FIVE

Justice, Equality, and Institutions

IF WHAT I HAVE CALLED the “theodicy challenge” is compelling, then we have good reason to question the coherence of the luck egalitarian project. Even if we were to grant that the existing, natural distribution of advantage or well-being among people is unequal, we cannot know that it is unjust—from which it follows that we cannot know that compensatory transfers from the more to the less advantaged are required by the principle of justice (even supposing we could reliably identify the more and less advantaged). But it might seem at first glance as if the implications of the theodicy challenge, thus understood, will prove destabilizing only for luck egalitarians. Why, we might ask, should an egalitarian of the more conventional, Rawlsian sort find any of this at all troubling? Surely a demonstration that the distribution of natural assets may not be unjust only impeaches an argument for distributional equality if that argument is grounded in the putative injustice of the natural distribution. That is, only if one thinks that an egalitarian distribution of social resources is just because it rectifies, or “redresses,” the injustice of “the natural lottery” will one be disconcerted by the thought that, for all we know, the natural distribution might be just (or that, if it is unjust, its injustice might consist in its deviation from some other unequal distribution of natural assets, rather than from equality). But egalitarians in the more orthodox, institutionalist line clearly do not think this—so perhaps they’re off the hook.

This thought returns us to a well-known debate about how to understand Rawls’s theory of justice. On the account favored by luck egalitarians, Rawls’s argument about the “morally arbitrary” character of human advantage grounds his commitment to equality (or to the Difference Principle): that is, the purpose of the principles of justice is to mitigate or redress the arbitrary distribution of natural and social advantage. But those I will call “institutionalists” about justice deny that Rawls’s theory is (or ought to have been) structured in this way. Equality, as Samuel Scheffler puts the case, is, for Rawls, “not, in the first instance, a distributive ideal, and its aim is not to compensate for misfortune.”1 It is rather a freestanding “social and political ideal.”

It claims that human relations must be conducted on the basis of an assumption that everyone’s life is equally important, and that all members of a society have equal standing.… Equality so understood is opposed not to luck but to oppression, to heritable hierarchies of social status, to ideas of caste, to class privilege and the rigid stratification of classes, and to the undemocratic distribution of power. In contrast to the inward-looking focus of luck egalitarianism, it emphasizes the irrelevance of individual differences for fundamental social and political purposes. As a moral ideal, it asserts that all people are of equal worth and that there are some claims that people are entitled to make on one another simply by virtue of their status as persons. As

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.