Creating the Conditions for Intergenerational Justice: Social Capital and Compliance

Abstract

Suppose philosophers succeeded in putting forward two equally desirable theories of intergenerational justice. Both of them fare extremely well in regard to either a case-implication critique or a prior-principle strategy of argumentation (with the former requiring us to check the implications of a principle in counterfactual cases, and the latter testing the compatibility of a principle with certain more fundamental values, according to Sen [197]). How are we to decide between them? To the extent that we believe that one of the purposes of political philosophy is to issue achievable and desirable recommendations (Stemplowska 319) or to be action-guiding (Swift 363), we might compare the two by applying a feasibility criterion. Such a criterion indicates that a state of affairs could be realized “if we were to summon sufficient practical will and direct our (individual or collective) efforts in the right direction” (Gheaus 450). In our case, the decision is a relatively easy one: both theories pass a threshold of acceptability and thus we would be morally justified in attempting to bring them about. Furthermore, by stipulation, world A in which theory x were implemented would be equally desirable as world B, in which theory y were implemented. The only distinction would be one concerning their feasibility.Nonetheless, this scenario is usually not one that is available to us. If theories differ based on their desirability as well as their feasibility, how are we to choose? One option would be to choose that moral theory which best satisfies the criteria mentioned by Buchanan, of moral accessibility, feasibility, and accessibility (Justice, Legitimacy). However, feasibility entails not only a static conception of duties, but a dynamic one, in which we postulate that agents have “duties that do not focus merely on what can be done in given circumstances, but also on how to change circumstances so that new things can be done” (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 812). In the present article, I argue that taking the idea of dynamic duties seriously requires that we redirect our efforts and resources toward those actions that would maximize the probability of achieving a successful transition from a non-ideal to an ideal state of the world. The argument is that, in the specific context of intergenerational justice, we ought to pay more attention to the matter of social capital extant in a society, if we want to achieve the ends of an intergenerational theory of justice. The concept of social capital puts under the same umbrella distinct features of social life such as networks and civic engagement, the role of reciprocity and trust in building institutions, and the effects that informal rules and institutions have on formal ones (Ostrom and Ahn, “Social Science Perspective” 4). Intuitively, these aspects are relevant for an account of intergenerational justice. The particular way in which they are relevant will be detailed later in this article.The claim that I defend is that the higher the level of social capital in a community, the more probable it will be that individuals are willing to redistribute resources to future generations. The underlying assumption that holds throughout the article is that public justification is important in construing a defense of a conception of justice. I proceed as follows. In the first section, I present an account of social capital. In the second section, I present the literature connecting social capital to political philosophy. In the third section, I argue why developing social capital is a worthwhile goal to pursue if we want to achieve intergenerational justice. The fourth section presents a series of measures that can increase the level of social capital. The fifth section responds to a series of potential objections that could be raised and concludes the paper.Much of the intellectual history of the twentieth century was dedicated to institutions and their function in shaping the social, economic, cultural, and political order. In a comprehensive definition put forward by March and Olsen, institutions represent “routines, procedures, conventions, roles, strategies, organizational forms, technologies . . . , beliefs, paradigms, codes, cultures and knowledge that surround, support, elaborate, and contradict those rules and routines” (March and Olsen 22). In North's formulation, institutions represent “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction, consisting of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, rules of conduct) and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)” (North 97). For a long time, it was believed that identifying the right institutional framework is an important determinant of whether a nation will be prosperous or not (Acemoglu and Robinson). At roughly the same time as the institutionalist turn in political science was taking place, theoreticians were discovering that there was something more involved in determining the success of an institutional framework. The ties between individuals had started to be seen in a new light (Granovetter, “Strength of Weak Ties”), as it was soon shown that creating durable institutions is a struggle that can often be pointless in the absence of a propitious social context (Putnam et al.). The concept of social capital and its connections with that of institutions have by now become ingrained in social sciences. Woolcock mentions that social capital research affected field studies as different as community life, democracy and governance, schooling and education, youth behavior problems, collective action problems, and economic processes (193). It is a little surprising that in contemporary political philosophy, social capital is largely ignored, in spite of the connections that can be made between it and republicanism, communitarianism, property-owning democracy, intergenerational justice, or relational egalitarianism. Before arguing that social capital can play a very important role in ensuring the feasibility of intergenerational justice, I try in this section to present what social capital is.Tocqueville wrote that “political associations can be considered as great free schools, where all citizens come to learn the general theory of associations” (914), which, when coupled with civil associations, leads to perfecting the “art of association.” This can allow them to “carry out certain enterprises together” (915). Much later, taking a page from Tocqueville's book, Elinor Ostrom and T. K. Ahn defined social capital “as an attribute of individuals and of their relationships that enhance their ability to solve collective-action problems” (“Meaning of Social Capital” 20). This functionalist interpretation of social capital sees it as a bag-of-tricks that individuals can delve into when they need to provide a public good or prevent a public bad from occurring. Unlike other definitions of social capital that I am going to present in this article, it has some insurmountable issues, in that it seems to be encompassing too much or too little, depending on the case. What exactly helps the individuals solve a collective-action problem? And, if something helps them at one point in time, but in the near future, that same thing does not help them, could we still define it as social capital? On what precisely is social capital contingent? It is perhaps for this reason that critics of social capital such as Portes (“Social Capital: Its Origins”) mention that the enthusiasm for this concept is “partially exaggerated.” However, I believe that we can come up with a working definition of social capital that avoids this indeterminacy problem.Coleman (“Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital”) and Putnam (“Prosperous Community”) also employ a functionalist approach to social capital, with the latter mentioning that it represents a feature of social organization that has the potential to boost the efficiency of society by allowing coordinated actions to be taken more easily. Burt refers to social capital in terms of social networks (“Social Structure of Competition”). Nahapiet and Ghoshal extend Burt's definition to also include resources that can be derived from social networks (“Social Capital, Intellectual Capital and the Organizational Advantage”), while Adler and Kwon reference “the goodwill available to individuals or groups” (23).1 Briefly, social capital is a concept usually employed to refer to “trust, norms and networks” (Putnam et al. 167). Ostrom and Ahn mention that there are three main forms of social capital: trust and norms of reciprocity; social networks; and formal and informal rules and institutions (“Social Science Perspective” 4–5). Lewicki and Brinsfield consider that trust can be considered a kind of reservoir from which people can draw if they want to solve collective problems more easily (287–88). Given that we seem to repeatedly encounter this problem-solving potential of social capital, we should tackle the reasons why researchers see it as serving this function.First of all, social capital is a kind of capital, that is, it can be conceived as an investment (in social relations) with the hope of receiving some benefits in the future (Lin). However, given that social capital appears after repeated interactions of individuals (Pasotti and Rothstein), it is not always a result of conscious investment. Shivakoti and Ostrom present the case of the Nepali irrigation systems, where the daily tribulations of solving the problem of efficient irrigation led the farmers to pool together their knowledge of water delivery in a much more efficient way than external authorities could have done. In that case, social capital was a by-product of individuals being forced by the circumstances in which they found themselves to cooperate. In game-theoretical terms, social capital has been pinpointed by researchers as a way to promote cooperation among individuals in circumstances in which the rational choice would be to defect. According to Putnam et al., the existence of social capital replaces the “never cooperate” strategy that characterizes social dilemmas such as prisoner's dilemma, prisoner's dilemma with n players, tragedy of the commons, or problems of collective action with a self-reinforcing equilibrium of cooperation. They argue that “in societies characterized by dense networks of civic engagement, an equilibrium [of cooperation] is attainable” (Putnam et al. 178). There are several ways in which social capital can turn an action situation in which rationality dictates the individuals to defect into one in which the dominant strategy is to cooperate. First of all, social ties and networks of civic engagement “increase the potential costs to a defector in any individual transaction and thus foster robust norms of reciprocity,” while at the same time improving communication and bestowing upon individuals a better knowledge about the trustworthiness of other people (Putnam et al. 172–73). Secondly, social capital represents a way of “creating mutually reinforcing expectations and trust to overcome the perverse short run temptations individuals face” (Ostrom, “Social Capital: A Fad?” 176). It is in this change that social capital operates to the incentives structure that an individual faces and that the potential of social capital really resides in. According to Coleman, “a prescriptive norm that constitutes an especially important form of social capital is the norm that one should forgo self-interest and act in the interests of the collectivity” (S104). Why would an individual be motivated to do that? Because, in the long term, just being a part of the collectivity will be beneficial for the individual. Social capital urges the individual to employ long-term maximizing strategies. One need not assume that individuals are altruists or egoists in the social capital paradigm. For instance, one of Ostrom's central assumptions regarding individuals is that they are “characterized by substantial heterogeneities of capabilities and interests” (“Constituting Social Capital” 559).Nonetheless, there are approaches to social capital that are reluctant to see it as a solution to collective action problems. Granovetter, for instance, criticized what he calls the undersocialized conception of human action, as it is seen in the rational choice approach and its branches (“Economic Action”). He considers that individuals are neither pursuing their own self-interest, nor are their actions completely guided by internalized norms, as oversocialized conceptions of human actions make them out to be: “[I]n reality, actors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy” (Granovetter, “Economic Action” 487). Instead, he argues that we should adopt a dynamic view of social relations and acknowledge “the role of concrete personal relations and structures of such relations in generating trust and discouraging malfeasance” (“Economic Action” 490). Furthermore, only in this way, says Granovetter, can we understand how institutions themselves evolve (“Economic Action” 505). These relations that are established among individuals by repeated interactions represent the point of convergence between different theoretical approaches to social capital. Putnam, for instance, in his effort to explain the declining level of connectivity between individuals in the United States, mentions that civic virtue draws its strength from being “embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations” (Putnam, Bowling Alone 16). The importance of social connections is also one of the least controversial aspects of social capital (unlike one other important element of social capital, trust, which has long been classified either as a form of social capital or an outcome of social capital). Sandefur and Laumann, for instance, consider that social capitals refers to “the many kinds of resources appropriable from interpersonal relationships” (481).There are several types of social connections that matter. Burt mentions that there are two main ways in which social networks are significant. The first is brokerage, which entails cross-group communication and leads to a diversification of opinions and practices. The second one is closure, which focuses on intra-group opinions and practices (Burt, “Social Structure” 8). The distinction is somewhat similar to Putnam's well-known taxonomy of bonding and bridging social capital. Putnam acknowledges that social capital is not always beneficial to all individuals. Sometimes, a group having high levels of social capital can cause negative externalities for individuals who do not possess membership in that group (the most often-mentioned example here being the Mafia). He also notices that while some forms of social capital are inclusive, others are exclusive. Bridging social capital refers to those forms that “encompass people across diverse social cleavages” (especially during civil rights movements), while bonding social capital encompasses “inward-looking forms, which tend to reinforce the homogeneity of the group” (Putnam, Bowling Alone 20). The downside of bonding social capital is that it can generate antagonism toward individuals who are not members of the group (see also Portes and Landolt 532). Nonetheless, it seems difficult to imagine that solidarity can coalesce within a group without bonding social capital. A strategy mentioned by Woolcock is developing at first a community's stock of bonding social capital, and then “complementing it over time with linkages to non-community members” (175).While bonding social capital can be dangerous, it is also a precondition for generalized reciprocity at the level of a community. Putnam defines generalized reciprocity as a principle saying that “I'll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return, and perhaps even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favor” (Putnam, Bowling Alone 142). It is this generalized reciprocity that allows individuals to surpass the problems of collective actions, and that can also play an important role in intergenerational justice (where one of the main problems is that you cannot expect reciprocity from future individuals). Wellman and Wortley mention that in communities in which there are “multiplex networks,” individuals can benefit from “social support that can transcend narrow reciprocity” (580, 559). To understand what multiplex networks and relationships are, we must return to Coleman (who, in turn, borrowed the term from Gluckman).Coleman conceived social capital as taking three main forms: obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms. All forms can be conceived as being connected for Coleman, as the more information individuals have at their disposal, the more they know what to expect from others. Similarly, the more that individuals help each other and the more that social norms encouraging cooperation develop, the more stringent are the obligations to aid fellow members. However, not all social relations are favorable for the development of social capital. One important property that must not be absent is what Coleman calls “closure,” that is, the interconnectedness of all individuals. Closure is easier to achieve in multiplex relations, which are characterized by the fact that they “allow the resources of one relationship to be appropriated for use in others” (Coleman 26). Coleman gives the example of two neighbors who use their relation as neighbors in order to monitor the activities of their children. Basically, what multiplex relations entail are “resources in the form of other persons who have obligations in one context that can be called on to aid when one has problems in another context” (Coleman 26).I previously mentioned that trust is a more complicated aspect of social capital research. For some authors, trust is an outcome of social capital. Nooteboom mentions that the most important role played by social capital is furthering common norms that surpass formal institutions, and that this trust-building capacity is why it can be a substitute for a weak institutional framework (45). For Ostrom and Ahn, trust and reciprocity are the result of the interaction of networks, institutions and contextual variables (“Social Science Perspective” 18). Diaconu and Dumitru also consider that shared understandings among individuals can lead to the development of trust, which in turn can be employed to modify the payoff structure of coordination games faced by individuals. On the other hand, there are researchers such as Putnam, Leonardi, and Nonetti who consider that social capital includes trust, norms, and networks (Putnam et al. 175). For the purposes of this paper, it is less important whether trust is an outcome or a feature of social capital. After all, “trust inheres in the . . . interactions” of individuals (Filk and Kilpatrick 104). What is important is that social capital is ineluctably linked with increased trust among the individuals of a community, and that trust can have beneficial effects for individuals, including economic benefits. Putnam explicitly states that “trusting communities have a measurable economic advantage in that they reduce transaction costs” (Bowling Alone 143).We have seen so far that social capital has—mostly and usually—beneficial effects. But why is it considered “the glue that holds societies together” (Serageldin and Grootaert 44)? First of all, in communities with high levels of social capital, there is a higher probability that individuals “develop adequate rules and norms to govern repetitive relationships, the importance of reputation being higher in such a community, and the cost of developing monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms relatively low” (Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity 26–27). As such, these communities are more likely to solve collective action problems, and we can expect that the well-being of individuals residing in such communities will also be higher. However, we must be careful not to consider social capital a panacea. As Portes and Landolt mention, “social capital is not a substitute for the provision of credit, material infrastructure, and education. What it can do is to increase the yield of such resources by reinforcing them with the voluntary efforts of participants and their monitoring capacity to prevent malfeasance” (547). The necessity of social capital is easier to understand if we look at what happens in places where there are low levels of social capital. Putnam et al. attribute the developmental differences between Southern and Northern Italy to the different levels of social capital, caused by the interaction of the historical path-dependency of institutional configurations and differences in the social contexts in which those institutions had operated. In a paragraph that could very easily belong in a neo-republican or relational egalitarian article, Putnam et al. mention that “citizenship in the civic community entails equal rights and obligations for all. Such a community is bound together by horizontal relations of reciprocity and cooperation, not by vertical relations of authority and dependency. Citizens interact as equals, not as patrons and clients” (Putnam et al. 88). This is very similar to the neo-republican ideal of freedom as non-domination conceived as the equivalent of “looking the other in the eye,” with no need of “bowing and scraping” (Pettit 87). Given that Putnam and his colleagues were following Machiavelli in conceiving an idealized civic community, it is no wonder that a society benefitting from high levels of social capital would pass the republican litmus test of looking the others in the eye as equals (Brennan and Hamlin 46). By contrast, say Putnam and his colleagues, life in communities lacking social capital “produces daily justification for feelings of exploitation, dependency and frustration” (Putnam et al. 111).Thus, not only is social capital important for the economic development of a community, but it also seems to be important for the well-being of individuals. Fortunately, for our purposes, we need not have a very specific, clear-cut definition of social capital. Putnam's definition of social capital as “trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (Putnam et al. 167) should work adequately in what follows. More empirically minded theorists will have to work out more precise ways of measuring social capital stocks in specific communities. If Putnam et al. feel that “those concerned with democracy and development should be building a more civic community” (185), the conclusion that I want to reach in this paper will be that if we are concerned with achieving intergenerational justice, we will have to pay more attention to stocks of social capital.Nonetheless, as the brief considerations about bonding social capital show, we must be careful what kind of social capital we promote. Lewandowski and Streich take an in-depth look at the downsides of social capital promotion. According to them, Putnam's “democratic strand” of social capital conceptualizes it as an “inventory of generalized trust, mutual obligations and shared cooperative attitudes that make democracy work” (Lewandowski and Streich 591). Nonetheless, they argue that Putnam ignores the “deep inequalities inherent in modern civil societies” (Lewandowski and Streich 592) and the fact that “the resource of social capital is for the most part only within the reach of those who already occupy or already have gained entry to the specific levels in which it exists and circulates” (Lewandowski and Streich 593). Lewandowski and Streich thus recommend that more attention be paid to what they call “the vertical accessibility and appropriability of social capital,” consisting in resources that can be used by individuals from a multiplicity of socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnical strata (594). This issue, however, is less likely to arise if we do not take social capital to be the alpha and omega of development, but instead just one way of boosting the feasibility of initiatives meant to improve the lives of individuals (similar to what is recommended by Portes and Landolt 547). Thus, I take social capital to be a necessary—though not sufficient—condition of achieving intergenerational justice. In the next section, I turn toward the matter of social capital and normative political theory. Although the connections between the two strands of theorizing are relatively scarce, some can be found in the writings of Tocqueville and Machiavelli, while more recently, Putnam and his colleagues pay closer attention to what Machiavelli and other republican writers were prescribing (Putnam et al.). Serageldin and Grootaert are some of the very few researchers who do mention that “social capital is best studied in the context of the contribution it makes to sustainable development” (40). In this paper, I intend to take this challenge seriously and show how achieving intergenerational justice can benefit from the concept of social capital that has been briefly explored in the paragraphs above.Suppose that Alexei is living in a town with dwindling levels of social capital. His parents taught him that voting is useless, and so Alexei chooses regularly to skip elections. As he is working in a nearby town, he spends a lot of time commuting, so he has less time available for social activities. He remains impervious to social movements that are taking place throughout the country, as he does not consider that his contribution would be that important. In short, Alexei is living in a community affected by all the factors that Putnam considers to have contributed to the decline of social capital in the United States (Bowling Alone 308–11). On the other hand, suppose that Victoria is living in a neighboring town, in which said social movements are taking place. Although she knows that her individual vote does not count for much, she chooses to invest her time in exerting her vote. Being active on different social media groups that discuss local politics, she does not have to spend a lot of time researching whom to vote. Furthermore, although her workplace is far from her home, on the commute, she chooses to read the local news, which she discusses with her co-workers at the water cooler.Finally, suppose that you are a researcher studying the willingness of individuals to distribute resources. Firstly, setting out to study this implies that you depart from the predictions of neo-classical economics, where one would expect that social capital has no bearing on the decision of an individual to (re-)distribute. However, real-world individuals rarely behave according to the predictions of neo-classical economics. The research done by behavioral economists has shown, for instance, that even the way a decision problem is formulated matters. Framing a decision in terms of losses or gains has a bearing on what individuals will eventually choose (Tversky and Kahneman), in contradiction with the invariance assumption of neo-classical economics (Kahneman and Tversky). It is not surprising that in behavioral game theory and in experimental game theory, it was found that sociocultural factors matter when it comes to distributing resources. This is best shown in the experimental studies of bargaining behavior, either in the form of an ultimatum game or a dictator game. The story of ultimatum games starts with the research conducted by Guth et al. In the ultimatum game, one individual is offered a sum of money that he has to decide how to split with another individual. If the second individual accepts, both can keep the sum, based on how the first one decided to divide it. If the second individual rejects the offer, neither of them gets anything (Camerer and Thaler 210). Hoffman et al. conducted several such games, in which they found out that offers regarded as unfair were often rejected, in spite of the fact that neo-classical economics would have indicated that no rational individual would turn down “free” money (“On Expectations”). More relevant to the subject at hand is the dictator game, where an individual decides by herself how to split a sum of money. Interestingly, Hoffman et al. discover that reputation matters in the dictator game. One of their conclusions is that “people value their reputations because of the long-term personal benefits that result . . . and a good reputation increases the chance of continued social interaction” (Hoffman et al., “Social Distance” 659). Camerer and Thaler explain this as an instance of adopting “rules of reciprocity that people learn in everyday life,” being “rational to treat others fairly and punish those who behave unfairly, because long-run concerns outweigh the short-run costs” (218). While this works for the ultimatum game, it is a less viable explanation for the dictator game. The more interesting hypothesis is the one advanced by Hoffman et al., according to which the “social distance” between individuals is an explanatory variable that can account for the allocations made by the “dictators” (“Social Distance”) (although we cannot neglect the fact that considerations of fairness also play a role in explaining the outcomes of the dictator games, according to Volacu [324]).In his meta-study of dictator games, Engel analyzes several potential explanations for the results of the dictator games (in which most individuals choose to distribute at least something to the other party) (Engel. The explanations range from “social control” to distributive concerns, and from framing to social distance. He discovers that “if the dictator is iden