Distributional Justice

Hilde Bojer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134428298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Introducing the main theories of distributional justice the book covers utilitarianism and welfare economics, moving on to Rawls's social contract and the Sen/Nussbaum capability approach with a refreshingly readable style. There is a chapter covering the position of mothers and children in theories of justice. The book then studies empirical methods used in analysing the distribution of economic goods, covering Lorenz curves and inequality measures. The concepts of income, wealth and economic goods are comprehensively discussed, with a particular view to their role in theories of justice. This book is an important read for economists and other social scientists, as well as philosophers who want to quantify social and economic justice.

1 Introduction

Women work longer hours than men in nearly every country, but men receive the lion’s share of income and recognition.¹

In November 2002, British firefighters threatened to strike for higher wages. One firefighter interviewed by the Guardian earned around 30,000 pounds a year after twenty-two years of service.² An English premiership football player might well earn as much in a week, while a care assistant had yearly earnings of 10,000 pounds.³

These are some examples of differences in economic circumstances, and I know in my heart that they are unjust. For many years, I did not realise that I could use my reason to explain why. When I studied economics in Oslo in the beginning of the 1960s, a truth universally acknowledged in the profession was that justice in distribution is not, and cannot be, the subject of academic research. There is, to be sure, the social welfare function. But the social welfare function is for the politicians to determine and for the economics profession to put it into practice unquestioned.

Accordingly, when I first began doing research on income distribution, I started off by learning what I could about empirical methods, inequality measures and the intricacies of concepts and definitions in income statistics. But increasingly I found myself becoming more interested in the why than the how of the analysis. Why is the distribution of household income more interesting than the distribution of individual income? Why should we be interested in measuring the degree of inequality in either of them? So I tentatively started to read Rawls and Sen, and made two discoveries, one of them delightful and the other rather disheartening.

The delightful discovery was that academic research into questions of justice in distribution is not only possible and legitimate, but also a flourishing academic discipline with an increasing number of practitioners. The disheartening discovery was that I did not understand the literature. I found it dense, abstruse, impenetrable. As I slowly began to understand something of the content, I made a third discovery, namely of the gap between what the philosophers write and what is studied in empirical analyses of income distribution.

Researchers working with empirical methods seem to take for granted that the ultimate aim of public policy is to increase individual welfare, and the task of the empirical analyst is to find the level and distribution of welfare. On the other hand, such outstanding moral philosophers as Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls and Amartya Sen are not at all concerned with welfare, but with opportunities, resources, rights and capabilities. According to them, achieving individual welfare and happiness is the person’s own responsibility. The state has the moral duty to further the means to, and remove constraints on, the pursuit of happiness, but not to secure that happiness itself.

But then again, these same philosophers seem quite unconcerned with how their concepts can be made operational for empirical analysis.

So I decided to write this book to bridge the gap between moral philosophy and empirical research. I have not succeeded; the bridge is still unbuilt. But here at least is a book where moral philosophy and empirical methods coexist between the same two covers, and with some attempts at interaction between the two parts.

The book is addressed to those students of the social sciences who are interested in both the why and the how of studying income distribution. Perhaps it may also be of some interest to researchers on either side of the divide who want to learn something about how the other half thinks.

Moral philosophy cannot, of course, prove that one way of organising society and arranging the distribution of economic goods is ‘objectively’ better than another. But it can make our ideas of justice more precise, help us to reason logically about justice and to find areas of agreement and disagreement. I also think that knowledge of moral philosophy could make empirical research more relevant to people’s concerns about justice in distribution.

I know Norwegian income statistics fairly well, which accounts for the numerical examples in this book. Here is one: by the end of the 1990s, the average woman in Norway received about 60 per cent of the income of the average man. (The percentage varies slightly with the definition of income used.) Is this difference in income unjust? To answer the question, we have to know the reasons for the difference. These are reasonably well known. About half the difference is due to different wage rates. Some part of these 20 per cent may be due to women receiving lower wages than men for the same work, but this part is probably fairly small. It is also very difficult to identify, because women on the whole do not do the same work as men. And the kinds of paid employment that women tend to undertake, are also the kinds that are not very well paid.

The remaining difference of 20 per cent is either due to women working part-time or not being in paid employment at all.

Most people now agree that it is wrong and unjust to discriminate against women by giving them lower pay than men for the same work. (But trade unions in Norway negotiated separate wage rates for women and men until about 1960.) The greater part of the difference in incomes, however, does not stem from discrimination, but from men and women making different choices in the labour market. In Norway, it is a long time since any profession or education was formally closed to women. Women’s choices of education and profession are made of their own free will. So it seems is their choice of part-time work.

At this point in my lectures, I usually ask the students to suggest why so many women work part-time. Invariably, the answer is given by one of the female students: women spend time taking care of the children. Disagreement about the justice of women’s low incomes then stems from disagreements on two points. The first concerns the question of just wages in the typical women’s professions, like nursing. The second concerns the justice of women doing most of the domestic unpaid work, particularly child care. There are also those who feel that the difference in incomes of men and women is of no importance because of income sharing between married couples. (I have never yet met a woman who agreed with this last statement.)

All the empirical research from which the above example was drawn was carried out in the last twenty to thirty years. (Before 1970, Statistics Norway did not even publish separate tables on the income of women and men.) The research was grounded in moral concerns about women’s economic and social position. The use I have made of it stems from what I have learned in moral philosophy about the importance of free choice and contingent circumstances. It has led me to question the widespread practice of basing empirical analysis on household income alone.

In spite of this example, the present book is not a feminist treatise. It contains no specific feminist methods or analyses. But it is written by a woman concerned about justice to women.

The book is in two parts: Theories of Justice and Measuring Inequality. Part I is an introduction to some important theories of justice. It starts with an overview of the theories considered in the following chapters. Chapter 3 discusses the idea of rewards according to deserts. I have tried to present welfarism (Chapter 4), Rawls’s social contract (Chapter 5), Dworkin’s equality of resources and the Nussbaum/Sen capability approach (Chapter 6) both critically and, I hope, fairly. But I found it impossible to hide my lack of enthusiasm for libertarianism and Marxism (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 contains my own ideas on children and motherhood in relation to distributional justice. I had to develop my own ideas because I found very little about children and women in the theories presented in the first seven chapters.

It should be emphasised that Part I is an introduction to the subject, aimed at social science students, not students of political philosophy. And it is my hope that the text can be read by social scientists in general and not only economists, even though there are some (very simple) formulas in Chapter 4. Students of economics may find parts of this same chapter wordy and lacking in rigour precisely because the mathematics is missing.

The first two chapters of Part II contain a detailed discussion of various ways of defining and measuring access to economic goods. I have tried to make clear that such access is more than cash income, and that therefore justice in distribution of economic goods concerns not only distribution of income. In Chapter 11, I have tried to make a connection between theories of justice and empirical measurement by regarding income as a constraint rather than as a measure of welfare.

Chapters 12–14 and 16 contain the theory of inequality measures, and a discussion of their properties. I have tried to avoid unnecessary formalisation. But it is impossible to compute measures of any kind without taking the trouble to understandatleastafew formulas. Measuring inequality is not altogether a straight-forward business, and it is important to understand why. I have given no proofs, only assertions. Those interested will find references to more rigorous expositions, containing references to the original articles with proofs, in ‘Suggested further reading’ at the end of the book.

Chapter 15 is a minimalist treatment of the definition and measurement of poverty.

There are a number of examples from Norwegian income statistics in Part II, because these are statistics I know well and have access to. They have been included to illustrate the methods and not because I imagine conditions in Norway to be of absorbing interest.

As for the vexing problem of ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’, I have addressed this issue by sometimes writing ‘he’ and sometimes ‘she’ more or less at random.

Part I: Theories of justice

2 About distributional justice

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.

(John Rawls)

Distributional justice is justice in the distribution of economic goods between the members of a society. For Plato and Aristotle justice was a personal virtue, the highest virtue of man. For the contemporary philosopher John Rawls, justice is a virtue of social institutions, that is of society. Not all authors distinguish between these two meanings of the term ‘justice’. In the present book, the distinction is regarded as important. I shall follow Rawls in considering justice and injustice as characteristics of society, not of the individual conscience.

Being a virtue of society, distributional justice presupposes the existence of a society. Traditionally this society is the nation state, and just distribution concerns distribution between the citizens of a nation state at a certain point in time. This is the class of theories of distributional justice that will be presented here. Therefore, two important issues of our times will not be considered: distribution between nations and distributions between generations, over time.

Distributional justice is only one of several aspects of the just society. The following exposition will not be a treatise of justice in the law courts, nor will it discuss the political organisation of society in general, such as the rights and duties of citizens, democratic institutions, the extent of freedom. The issues of justice in distribution will be treated in isolation from other aspects of justice in so far as such partial treatment of the subject is possible.

Some excursions into wider issues is nevertheless unavoidable. Justice in distribution is a societal concern and the provision of justice in distribution is the responsibility of the state. There may be conflicts between justice in distribution on the one hand and individual rights and freedom on the other. Whoever demands justice in distribution must of necessity accept that the state be given the power to implement such justice. Several of the theories to be discussed in the sections that follow deal with theories of justice in distribution as a part of a wider theory of the just society.

Economic goods

Distributional justice is justice in the distribution between persons, of goods that are scarce and transferable; which I shall call economic goods. It is about scarce goods because the question of just distribution does not arise where there is abundance: enough for every one. Moreover, the concept of distributional justice only makes sense for transferable goods: goods that it is possible to take from one individual and give to another. Many goods that we regard as important are neither scarce nor transferable. Health, intelligence, musicality and other talents are not transferable, nor is happiness. But some non-transferable goods may be acquired by means of goods that are transferable. Good nutrition as well as medical care fosters health. There is a well-established connection between poverty and ill-health. The effects of a physical disability such as blindness may be mitigated by the transfer of economic goods, for example the means to keep a guide dog and to acquire books in Braille. Conceivably, a lack of non-transferable goods may also be compensated for by transferable goods.

The distribution of economic goods is not the same as the distribution of monetary income. The distribution of income decides the distribution of goods that can be bought with money in the market, but there are important economic goods that are not so available. In all modern countries, some economic goods are distributed in kind by the government to the citizens. This distribution varies from state to state, from nation to nation. Defence, courts of law and police are the responsibilities of government everywhere (for good or ill), as is at least some part of the physical infrastructure such as roads, harbours and airports. The provision of other parts of the infrastructure (water, energy) as well as the provision of education, health care, social insurance are available from the public and/or the private sector in varying combination. The extent to which economic goods should be provided in kind by the government, and how they in this case should be distributed, is an issue of distributional justice.

In all economies, there is also a so-called informal sector of varying size and importance: production, exchange and distribution of economic goods outside the monetary economy. Housework, subsistence farming, child care are examples of activities wholly or mainly outside the monetary economy. These are also, as it happens, activities mainly carried out by women all over the world.

So, distribution of economic goods is not purely a question of the distribution of monetary income. Even so, the distribution of monetary income is of particular significance. First, because money is technically easy to transfer. Second, because money buys a large class of goods.

The connection between economic goods and income and wealth will be considered in more detail in Part II, Chapter 9.

Global and local justice

Some authors distinguish between global and loca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Theories of justice
• Part II: Measuring inequality
• Appendix A: Uncertainty and expected utility
• Appendix B: Sampling errors
• Notes
• Suggested further reading
• References