Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought

Camilla Boisen, Matthew C. Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317570554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Who has what and why in our societies is a pressing issue that has prompted explanation and exposition by philosophers, politicians and jurists for as long as societies and intellectuals have existed. It is a primary issue for a society to tackle this and these answers have been diverse.

This collection of essays approaches some of these questions and answers to shed light on neglected approaches to issues of distribution and how these issues have been dealt with historically, socially, conceptually, and practically. The volume moves away from the more dominating and traditionally cast understandings of distributive justice and shows novel and unique ways to approach distributive issues and how these can help enlighten our course of action and thought today by creating new pathways of understanding. The editors and contributors challenge readers by exploring the role and importance of restorative justice within distributive justice, exploring the long shadow of practices of trusteeship, and concepts of social and individual rights and obligations in welfare and economic systems, social protection/provision schemes, egalitarian practices and post-colonial African political thought.

Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought empowers the reader to cast a more critical and historically complete light on the idea of a fair share and the implications it has on societies and the individuals who comprise them.

Part 1 Historical Approaches to Distributive Justice

The focus in this section is on specific historical debates and ideas of distributive justice. In dealing with the context of historical debates, the chapters presented here recover ignored and even lost aspects of justice in the history of political thought, whether it be in the political thought of a specific thinker or identifying specific concerns of justice that have been recurrent themes at different times and places. By approaching the contentiousness of ideas pertaining to ‘distributive justice’ as historically grounded and contingently conceived, these chapters create new pathways of understanding and conceptualisation, first by recognising the contingent nature of ideas and, second, identifying their historical locality and genesis. As we move forward to Parts II and III, this section demonstrates how neglected historical aspects of distributive justice that our authors explore in their respective chapters can enlighten present issues, arguments and approaches. To paraphrase one contributor in the volume, Samuel Fleischacker, good normative work in political theory is enriched by a firm grip on the history of the concepts used in our normative arguments. Indeed, interesting normative conclusions can sometimes be drawn fairly directly from that history. Only by doing this can we clarify our normative beliefs, and therefore more readily see their implications, when we understand better from where they came.

Fleischacker works on this very assumption as he inspects the notion of what a right to welfare has historically meant in coming to terms with its modern conceptual recurrence of what it should mean. Carl Knight carves a space for exploring the historical incidents of a key, but often underserved, aspect of contemporary debates in ‘distributive justice’, namely luck egalitarianism. David James writes about Fichte’s Closed Commercial State to show it takes many conceptual turns that we take for granted in contemporary liberal theories of distributive justice. Finally, Matt Zwolinski shows how representatives of the Social Darwinist traditions might suggest closer proximity to contemporary liberal theories of social justice than has typically been assumed when considering core issues of justice such as luck and personal responsibility.

1 A Right to Welfare

Historical and Philosophical Reflections

Samuel Fleischacker

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737607-2

I explore here both what the right to welfare historically has meant, and what it should mean: inquiries that are not sharply separable, in my opinion. More specifically, I attempt to do two things. First I explain the origins of the notion of a ‘right to welfare’ and why it is a useful term by which to understand debates over the nature of distributive justice (sections I–III). I then argue, on normative grounds, that this right is best conceived as what eighteenth-century theorists and activists would call a ‘natural right’, not merely a legal right (sections IV and V).¹ I proceed throughout on the assumption that good normative work in political theory is enriched by a grip on the history of the concepts we use, and indeed that interesting normative conclusions can sometimes be drawn directly from that history: we clarify our normative beliefs, and therefore more readily see their implications, when we understand better whence they arose.

I

I developed much of the historical account I use here in my 2004 book, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Fleischacker, 2004), and would therefore like to begin by summarising my argument there. The book grew out of conversations sparked by two sentences in a review I wrote of Charles Griswold’s study of Adam Smith. I complained in the review that there is something confused about saying, as Griswold and many other commentators do, that Smith ‘rejects’ the idea of distributive justice.² How can he reject that idea, I asked, given that it didn’t come into existence, in its modern sense, until the 1790s, after Smith died.

As regards Smith’s writings, it seemed to me that the point was fairly obvious. Smith does say that distributive justice ‘cannot be extorted by force’ (Smith, 1976), but he also makes clear that he is using the phrase ‘distributive justice’ in its traditional natural law sense, in which it ‘comprehends all the social virtues’, including charity and generosity but also such qualities as a disposition to serve and honour ‘men of merit’ (Smith, 1976, TMS: 269–270). Nobody, in Smith’s time or since, has thought that all social virtues should be enforced, that people should be forced to show respect to ‘men of merit’ or indeed that people should be forced to give charity, on a one-to-one, interpersonal basis. Smith was reporting a commonplace of the natural law tradition, according to which some interpersonal obligations can be enforced while others cannot be, and ‘distributive justice’ is the name for the ones that cannot be.³ He was not primarily talking about duties to the poor at all, and he was not, by any means, rejecting a tradition that had used ‘distributive justice’ for enforceable obligations that society might have to the poor.

So far, so obvious, I thought, but to my claim that the idea of distributive justice was invented in the 1790s, I heard a lot of ‘what abouts?’. ‘What about Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels’, I was asked, ‘or Acts 4:35, which describes a community in which “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need”?’ ‘What about Plato, and the utopian tradition?’ other people asked, and some brought up the English Poor Laws, or the ‘right of necessity’ in Thomas Aquinas.

Well, each of these ‘what abouts?’ had a ready response, but when I sat down to write up the responses, I found it took me over seventy pages to do so. It then occurred to me that I might have a book here, if I added in a little on what led the concept of distributive justice to arise in the eighteenth century, and a summary of the more familiar developments of that concept in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result was a short history of the idea of distributive justice, among philosophers and political theorists from Aristotle to Rawls.

The main argument of my book is fairly simple. First, I lay out a set of criteria for what we call ‘distributive justice’ today. This takes the form of the following five premises, all of which are presupposed, I maintain, by the modern notion of distributive justice:

1. Individuality: Each individual, and not just societies or the human species as a whole, has a good that deserves respect, and each individual is due certain rights and protections in order to pursue that good.
2. Material desert: A share of material goods sufficient to cover basic human needs is part of every individual’s due, part of the rights and protections that everyone deserves.
3. Rationality: The fact that individuals deserve this can be justified rationally, in terms to which people of any religion and no religion can agree.
4. Practicability: The distribution of this share of goods is practicable: attempting consciously to achieve it is not a fool’s project.
5. State as guarantor: The state, and not merely private individuals or organisations, ought to be guaranteeing the distribution.

I then try to show how each of the pre-modern ideas and practices that looks somewhat like what we call distributive justice in fact rejects or ignores one of these crucial premises.

Thus Aristotle, who coined the phrase, meant by ‘distributive justice’ the virtue of giving goods to people in accord with merit, but merit was something that needed to be earned and it couldn’t possibly be true that all people ‘merit’ any set of goods. That contradicts our second premise. Moreover, Aristotelian ‘distributive justice’ was primarily concerned with political, not material, goods – the distribution of a role in government is his main example. The early Christian emphasis on helping the poor, on the other hand, was largely part of a commitment to humbling oneself before God, not an attempt to eradicate poverty. Jesus and his apostles tried to live with the poor, not to end poverty. And the paradigm Christian mode of giving to the poor, until the end of the eighteenth century, was one in which giver and recipient alike saw the gifts as undeserved, as a reflection of God’s grace to man in Christ. The poor deserve nothing from the rich, but receive something anyway, out of the rich person’s grace. This, again, runs up against our second premise. In its reliance on religious rather than secular arguments, it also offends against our third premise, and (relatedly) it leads to views that conflict with our fifth premise, according to which the state, not private individuals or the church, ought to be the primary agent for helping the poor. We see here the sharp difference between justice and charity. Justice imposes a duty on the agent and a right on the recipient, while charity expresses a benevolence above and beyond duty in the agent, and bestows no right on the recipient. Justice is thus required of us, but is satisfied with an act, regardless of our motivations, while charity is supererogatory, but is satisfied only if we have a certain kind of motivation. And because justice is required of us, and satisfied by an act, it can be enforced by law, while the corresponding features of charity mean that it cannot be legally enforced. Moving aid to the poor out of the domain of charity and into the domain of justice thus has enormous implications for its relevance to the politics. Modern distributive justice depends on that move.

Something similar goes for the other ‘what abouts’. Aquinas’s ‘right of necessity’ is a stop-gap measure by which a person may take what she needs for immediate survival if it would endanger her life to go through normal legal processes; it is not, cannot be, a part of any normal legal process. But that means, contrary to our fifth premise, that it is not something provided by the state. The utopians, from Plato onwards, are collectivists who recoil from the individualism of our first premise and promote equality out of an interest in strong bonds across the polis, not out of a concern for what the poor deserve. Collectivists, from Plato through Marx, tend not to be enthusiastic about justice in any form, which they see as concerned to protect individuals against the will of the body politic as a whole. Pre-modern utopians, in addition, do not present their visions as practicable, offering them instead as a fictional device for enlarging our moral imaginations; our fourth premise is thus no part of their project. Finally, the various European Poor Laws that get formulated in the sixteenth century or so, including the English Poor Laws, are concerned far more to control the poor than to give them rights (Fleischacker, 2004: 151, fn. 86). It was at least as important a part of these laws that they inflicted severe punishments on able-bodied beggars as that they granted relief to the poor who could not work. Moreover, they were justified on grounds of societal charity towards the poor, not of justice (ibid.: 50–52).

Only at the end of the eighteenth century, with the rise of a social science that made a lot of things seem practicable that had never seemed so before, the decline of traditional beliefs in a natural human hierarchy in which poor people belonged at the bottom of society, and the first hints of the idea that the poor are equal in virtue and capacity with all other human beings – many of those first hints to be found in the work of Adam Smith – do the premises that allow for the modern concept of distributive justice begin to circulate. And only with the political programme of ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, at the end of the French Revolution, and the writings of Tom Paine and Condorcet and Kant and Fichte, does that concept get expressly articulated and enter mainstream political discourse. Indeed, it takes a while for the idea to become really accepted even then, since neither utilitarians nor Marxists were fully comfortable with its basic terms, and the idea was bitterly rejected by conservatives and libertarians, such as Burke and Spencer (Fleischacker, 2004: 75–80).

II

That’s the short version of my book. Since writing it, I’ve altered my views a bit. In particular, I’ve been influenced by Gareth Stedman Jones’s An End to Poverty? Stedman Jones has a similar view of the role of Smith, and the French Revolution, in bringing about modern attitudes towards poverty, but understands those attitudes under a somewhat different rubric. Stedman Jones argues, as I do, that the notion that states should attempt to end poverty first arises in the late eighteenth century, but maintains that the central point of that notion was to provide the conditions for a properly educated and independent democratic citizenry rather than to help individuals lead private lives – that it was primarily part of a programme for radical democracy rather than part of a conception of justice.

The distinction between a concern for justice and a concern for democracy is interesting, and I’m not quite sure what to say about its place in eighteenth-century debates over poverty. It seems to me that some late eighteenth-century authors were primarily interested in fostering a democratic citizenry, while others saw aid to the poor as more a matter of giving people what they deserve in the pursuit of their individual lives: more a matter of justice, strictly speaking. Paine’s writings, and the excerpts Stedman Jones brings from the report of the Comité de Mendicité, suggest that a concern for the poor as fellow citizens rather than (just) fellow human beings is the main consideration behind their proposals. Smith and Kant, to the extent that they contribute to this discussion, both imply that aid to the poor should be required of people as a duty to fellow human beings, more than to fellow citizens. Babeuf and Fichte understand duties to the poor as something that should become part of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: The Limits of Distributive Justice: A Brief Exploration of Restorative Justice
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Distributing Distributive Justice
• PART I Historical Approaches to Distributive Justice
• PART II Distributive Justice Reconsidered: Forging New Debates
• PART III New Horizons Beyond the West: African and Global Issues in Distributive Justice
• Index