Spheres of Justice #5

https://merjet46.blogspot.com/2019/06/spheres-of-justice-6.html

Chapter 3 is about security and welfare.

Walzer posits socially recognized needs. “The social contract is an agreement to reach decisions together about what goods are necessary to our common life, and then to provide those goods to one another.” … “Communal provision is both general and particular. It is general whenever public funds are spent so as to benefit all or most of the members without any distribution to individuals. It is particular whenever goods are actually handed over to all or any of the members. Water, for example, is one of ‘the bare requirements of civil life,’ and the building of reservoirs is a form of general provision” (65-6).

“People don’t just have needs, they have ideas about their need; they have priorities, they have degrees of need; and these priorities and degrees are related not only to their human nature but also tot their history and culture. Since resources are always scarce, hard choices have to be made. I suspect these can only be political choices. They are subject to philosophical elucidation, but the idea of need and commitment to communal provision do not by themselves yield any clear determination of priorities or degrees” (66).

There has never been a political community that did not engage its collective strength – its capacity to direct, regulate, pressure and coerce – in providing needs of its members. The modes of organization, the levels of taxation, the timing and reach of conscription: these have always been a focus of political controversy. The building of fortresses, dams, and irrigation, armies, the securing of food supply and trade generally all require coercion. The state, with its agents, is the tool of coercion. Communal provision is always mediated by politicians, priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats who introduce distortions into the process, siphoning off money and labor for their own purposes or using provision as a form of control (68).

Walzer follows with sections about Athens, Greece in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, B.C. and a medieval Jewish community.

“Surely the price of social survival includes state expenditures for military security, say, and public health, and education. Socially recognized needs are the first charge against the social product; there is no real surplus until they have been met. What the surplus finances is the production and exchange of commodities outside the sphere of need. Men and women who appropriate vast sums of money for themselves, while needs are still unmet, act like tyrants, dominating and distorting the distribution of security and welfare” (75-6).

“Distributive justice in the sphere of welfare and security has a twofold meaning: it refers, first to the recognition of need and, second, to the recognition of membership” (78).

He criticizes John Rawls’ hypothetical “original position” and “difference principle” (79). They don’t much help in determining what choices people will make or should make when they know their particular circumstances. Also, what are “fair shares” of things like justice, tranquility, defense, and liberty? The ideas are also vague. 

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