Benefits Of Social Cooperation Research Articles

The Etiquette of Equality

The Etiquette of Equality

Bhandary on Liberal Care Provision

According to Asha Bhandary, there is a liberal (Rawlsian) justification for including “the receipt of dependency care among the benefits of social cooperation” (“Liberal Dependency Care,” 43). The novelty is to claim that such care is among the Rawlsian circumstances of justice. I argue that liberalism does not support this extremely strong claim. Dependency care is indeed among the goods generated by social cooperation, broadly speaking—but so are virtually all goods, such as pizza provision, scarcely any of which are among the circumstances of justice. Most of us have ample inclination toward caring for dependents—but neither is this extended to everyone else’s dependents, nor is it mostly a legal duty, as indeed having children at all is not. Nor should it be on liberal principles. Neither of the two Rawlsian Principles support general dependency care. And, Bhandary’s “strong proceduralism,” calling for the training of all persons in care-giving skills, would edge up toward totalitarianism—hardly a welcome outcome of liberalism.

Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 288 pp.

Review of Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 288 pp.One of the holy grails of political philosophy is creating a fully functioning theory of distributive justice based on the concept of desert. There are fairly comprehensive and sophisticated libertarian, egalitarian and prioritarian theories that claim to specify, with some degree of precision, how the burdens and benefits of social cooperation should, normatively speaking, be distributed. However, while there are many philosophers who have made impressive contributions to the study of the concept of desert, there is no integrated desert-based theory of justice that can give us some useful guidance on who should get what. This is, in some ways, surprising; as those who work on desert often note, the basic notion that justice requires giving people what they deserve has considerable intuitive plausibility. Fred Feldman's Distributive justice: getting what we deserve from our country seeks to take this basic idea and develop it into a theory of distributive justice that compares favorably with familiar theories of justice, such as luck-egalitarianism, sufficientism, libertarianism, and prioritarianism.Perhaps one reason why desert has not been particularly prominent in discussions about justice is that the basic concept, as it is generally used, is rather stretchable; people discuss it in very different ways. Sometimes saying that one deserves something is to say nothing more than that there is some reason why one should have it. On other occasions, claiming to deserve something involves making a very specific argument about how the virtuous nature of one's actions justifies some reward. Still others invoke desert to claim compensation for losses they might have incurred. These, and other, conceptions of desert mainly differ in three things: the goods or modes of treatment that people might deserve, the reasons why they might deserve them, and who should ensure that they receive them. This basic disagreement about the nature of the concept makes it difficult to develop it into an appealing theory of justice.Feldman is particularly aware of the need to settle on a specific conception of desert in order to construct a desert-based theory of justice. He distinguishes four main conceptions of desert, and concludes that the most viable candidate for grounding a theory of justice is what he calls political economic desert. In this conception of desert, members of a particular community deserve certain political and economic deserts, namely the goods, rights and obligations that they can only receive from their community and that they need in order to flourish as communal beings. These so-called community essential goods include security, opportunity, political rights, access to healthcare and the like. The reason why members of a community deserve these community essential goods, the political economic desert base, is that these individuals have community essential needs. By this Feldman means that they require these goods in order to live successful lives in a social context. The government, i.e., the political economic distributor, has the duty to make sure individuals have the goods they need to flourish, precisely because they need them in order to do so. This means that, according to Feldman, everyone living in a certain state deserves to have their community essential needs met. In this way, Feldman arrives at the flagship formulation of his theory of justice:There is perfect political economic distributive justice in a country if and only if in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political economic desert in virtue of having a political economic desert base, he or she receives that desert from the appropriate economic distributor (p. 72).With this theory of justice in hand, Feldman proceeds to demonstrate that it is superior to other, familiar theories of distributive justice. …

Bargaining and agreement in Gauthier's moral contractarianism

Bargaining and distribution of benefits accruing from social cooperation are central topics in contractarian accounts of morality or distributive justice in general and David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (MbA) in particular. In this paper, I raise some problems for MbA both with regards to bargaining over the benefits of social cooperation and the distribution of such benefits. The worries I raise piggyback on a couple of Jan Narveson's earlier queries of some of the topics in MbA: those of ‘questionable foundation’ and redundancy. However, I go beyond the substance of these queries by arguing that they raise fundamental worries about the correctness of the description of the elements of the bargaining situation, and the role and significance of agreement in MbA.

Cohen's Ambiguities

Cohen's Ambiguities

How Egalitarian is Rawls's Theory of Justice?

Gerald Cohen's critique of John Rawls's theory of justice is that it is concerned only with the justice of social institutions, and must thus arbitrarily draw a line between those inequalities excluded and those allowed by the basic structure. Cohen claims that a proper concern with the interests of the least advantaged would rule out ‘incentives’ for ‘talented’ individuals. I argue that Rawls's assumption that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society does not arbitrarily restrict the concerns of political justice, as Cohen claims. Further, I argue that it does not allow ‘deep’ inequalities within a just basic structure. When properly understood, Rawls's theory of justice is strongly egalitarian, taken as a theory of fairness in the way the burdens and benefits of social cooperation are distributed, even if it is not as egalitarian as Cohen wishes.

CRIMINALIZATION AND COMPENSATION

There are only two species of justice: distributive justice and rectificatory justice. Distributive justice is primarily concerned with the distribution of rights and duties to members of society by way of society's institutions. Included in this concern for a just distribution of rights and duties is a concern for those members of society who are disadvantaged in their opportunities to participate in the benefits of social cooperation. When such disadvantages arise, distributive compensation is due to these members of society as a means of removing the disadvantage. To compensate for something is to counterbalance it; to give something equivalent in value to the thing. “The root of ‘compensate’ is “to weigh,” that is to weigh different things together in order to establish a balance between them…‘compensation’ carries the connotation of providing something equivalent in value to that which has been lost.” In the case of distributive compensation, this rendering of an equivalent in value is done in order to alleviate some disadvantage or natural loss that is thought to pose an undue hindrance on members of society.

Intergenerational Cooperation and Distributive Justice

Kevin Sauvé has recently argued in this journal that David Gauthier's conception of ‘morals by agreement’ is inimical to the development of long-term productive investment and sustainable levels of resource exploitation. According to Sauvé, this is because society is confronted with an intergenerational interaction problem whose strategic equilibrium is suboptimal (a ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’). However, unlike the ‘contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma’ that Gauthier analyzes, the intergenerational version cannot be solved by an appeal to constrained maximization. As a result, Sauvé claims, Gauthier cannot effectively address the question of intergenerational justice.The portion of Sauvé's argument that concerns me is the following:Gauthier solves the contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma by ensuring that each person will cooperate only if all others cooperate, and indeed his conception of morality is aimed at ensuring that all individuals incur the costs as well as the benefits of social cooperation. But the contemporaneous solution cannot be applied to the Intergenerational Dilemma: if each generation will save for the next only if the previous generations have also saved, none will ever save. (170)