The High Cost of Rawls Inegalitarianism

Abstract

T r- HIS paper will argue that the roots and trunk of John Rawl's A Theory of Justice are more egalitarian than its branches. Specifically, Rawl's difference principle coheres relatively poorly with the more fundamental thrust of the theory's assumptions as to human and moral desirability. Particularly salient are the tensions between inequalities of income and wealth permissible under the operation of the difference principle in advanced industrial society on the one hand, and the basic values of political and equality thereof, the value of for all citizens, community or solidarity, the social bases of self-respect, opportunity, individual happiness and self-fulfillment, and the stability of a just society. The narrower question before us, then, is of the extent to which inequalities of wealth and income are compatible with optimizing these latter more basic values. Rawls' difference principle of course includes consideration of the social bases of self-respect, so it is the possible tensions between equality and the social bases of self-respect and inequalities in other primary social goods (e.g., income and wealth, opportunities and powers, etc.) also subsumed under the difference principle that concern us. The difference principle also assumes that the background conditions of equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity obtain. This feature, however, does not disarm egalitarian criticism of the theory. It simply means that it must become the task of the definitive egalitarian critique to show, through empirical evidence and conceptual analysis, that departures from equality of income and wealth lead, at least under certain conditions, to violations of lexically higher principles or other desirable social values relevant to distributive justice. Given the constraints of space and data availability, the present paper will proceed by way of intimation and suggestion rather than through the marshaling of the requisite evidence and analysis. The essentials of the difference principle are by now well known. The underlying idea is that the contingencies of nature and fortune are to be treated as a common asset and placed at the service of the interests of the entire society, and particularly the least advantaged members of the society. The latter may appropriately denounce any distribution of primary social goods as unjust if they would benefit in absolute terms from a more egalitarian distribution.1 This feature of the theory indicates the difference in approach between Rawls' theory and traditional utilitarian and strict egalitarian conceptions. We can draw from this formulation that which Rawls acknowledges: the difference principle might permit wide and increasing divergence in both directions from an average income. But more important for a broad-based egalitarian critique, we must recognize that Rawls' formulation is prima facie well adapted to withstand egalitarian criticism. The egalitarian must be prepared to maintain the not obviously appealing view that such distributions of primary social goods, or of income and wealth specifically, among representative persons as five units and five units, or five units and six units, are preferable from the standpoint of