Spheres of Justice #14

This is my final post on Spheres of Justice.

I saw the book and decided to give it a try. Well before reading it I had the idea that morality is a contextual matter. I even wrote a journal article, Egoism and Others (link to abstract), to that effect. This came from considering the differences between being in a public place among strangers, with family or other kin, in the workplace, action on behalf of somebody else, or working for the government. I continued reading the book because of its unique perspective on justice and morality that differed from mine. We are social creatures, but the social contexts vary. Walzer calls them “spheres.” I believe “domains” is a better term, but that is not material. He also invokes the concept of membership in social groups as material, something that I had not considered.

Advocates of individualism, e.g. Ayn Rand, tend to take a simpler perspective -- the individual versus society or its government. Social relations aren’t segmented into different spheres or contexts.

Of course, I didn’t agree with everything Walzer says, but the book was quite often thought-provoking. That is the main reason I continued reading the book until the end.

Previous

Spheres of Justice #13

Chapter 13, the final one, is titled Tyrannies and Just Societies.

Men and women claim justice, and resist tyranny, by insisting on the meaning of social good among themselves. Justice is rooted in their distinct understanding of places, honors, jobs, things of all sorts, that constitute a shared way of life. To override that understanding is to act unjustly.

No account of buying and selling, no description of free exchange, can possibly settle the question of justice in a capitalist system. What is decided to be just requires knowing a great deal about other distributive processes and about their relative autonomy from or integration into the market. The dominance of capital outside the market makes capitalism unjust.

Tyrants are endlessly busy. There is so much to do if they are to make their power dominant everywhere, in the bureaucracy and the courts, in the markets and factories, in parties and unions, in schools and churches, among friends and lovers, kinfolk and fellow citizens.

Complex equality is the opposite of totalitarianism: maximum differentiation as against maximum coordination.

Contemporary forms of egalitarianism have their origin in the struggle against capitalism and the particular tyranny of money. State officials will be tyrants, we are told, whenever their power is not balanced by money. Capitalists will be tyrants whenever wealth is not balanced by a strong government. Still, the tyranny of money is less frightening than the tyranny with origins on the other side of the money/politics divide.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #12

Chapter 12 is about political power. One of the things that men and women pursue is state power. It is also the means by which all different pursuits, including state power itself, are regulated. Hence the simultaneous requirement that state power be sustained and inhibited – mobilized, divided, checked and balanced. Political power can protect its constituents, but it may also tyrannize them.

Politicians act on our behalf and arguably with our consent. But in most places and times, political rulers function as agents of husbands and fathers, aristocratic families, degree holders, capitalists, or the wealthy. The agents may be tyrants.

Walzer lists several ways that political power may be blocked.

- Sovereignty does not extend to enslavement.

- State officials may not control marriages or interfere in personal and familial relations, including raising children.

- State officials cannot violate shared understanding of guilt and innocence, corrupt the system of criminal justice, use political repression to punish, or employ cruel and unusual punishment.

- State officials cannot sell political power or auction of decisions.

- All subjects/citizens are equal before the law.

- Private property is safe against arbitrary taxation and confiscation.

- State officials cannot control religious practices.

- State officials may legislate a curriculum, but not interfere in actual teaching.

- State officials must guarantee free speech, free press, free assembly.

Power is not a private matter. It has be exercised to be enjoyed, and when exercised, the rest are directed, policed, manipulated, helped, and hurt. Who should hold it? Two possible answers are (1) those who best know how to use it, and (2) those who most immediately experience its effects.

Public offices, paid for from public funds, provide public services. Hence, relocating an office is an exercise of political power over the taxpayers. A private firm is different. Its relations with its customers are more like brief encounters. Requiring a private firm’s relocating be made a public matter would impinge upon the sphere of money and commodities with its attendant freedoms. Marx’s idea that ownership of the means of production should be a public and political matter would also impinge upon the sphere of money and commodities with its attendant freedoms.

Whereas feudal property was founded and sustained on armed force, capitalist property rests upon activities that are intrinsically non-coercive and non-political.

Walzer includes a section about the Pullman Company, which made train-cars, and the “company-town” of Pullman, Illinois. The chapter’s final section is about democracy. It describes the Athenian Lottery and addresses political parties and primaries.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #11

I am skipping Chapter 10 about divine grace. Chapter 11 is about recognition. As preface, humans want recognition from other humans in one form or another, be it for their character, achievements, respect of their rights, rank, and so forth. Walzer explores this in several ways, beginning with the feudal era.

“In a hierarchical society like that of feudal Europe, a title is a name of a rank attached to the name of a person. To call a person by his title is to place him in a social order and, depending on the place, to honor or dishonor him. Titles commonly proliferate in the upper ranks where they mark off fine distinctions and suggest the intensity and importance of the struggle for recognition. The lower ranks are more grossly titled, and the lowest men and women have no titles at all but are called by their first names or some disparaging name” (249).

If we know everyone’s title, then we know the social order; we know to whom we must defer and who must defer to us; we are prepared for all encounters. This sort of knowledge is easy to obtain and widely diffused.

Higher ranking people can behave badly, and when they do, their social inferiors are likely to notice and comment on it among themselves. The comments may be more public, but short of rebellion or revolution, they have little choice but to yield to the honor, respect, or deference that come with higher rank.

Thomas Hobbes took disputes of aristocrats, particularly the duel, as one of the archetypal forms of the war of all against all. Such battles are fought only among equals. When the lower ranks challenge the higher, it’s rebellion or revolution instead. Democratic revolutions represent an attack on the whole system of prevailing social judgments. If the struggle is broadened, the social good at issue is more diverse – honor, respect, esteem, praise, prestige, status, dignity, etc.

Recognition must be won, sometimes from people reluctant to give it. It can be fleeting, such as of celebrities by the mass media. Not all agree. Some may regard a public recognition as undeserved, a matter of luck or the result of being in the class of people most valued for the time and place. Often the flow of recognition or honor is shaped by the dominance of other goods such as wealth, power, or education. Regardless, a simple equality is unobtainable; it would leave all without recognition of being persons regarded for their individual characteristics.

Punishment is the most important example of dishonor. It may take the form of ostracism. Prolonged unemployment and poverty are a kind of economic exile.

Democratic citizenship is a status disconnected from every kind of hierarchy. Being a citizen is a simple form of public recognition.

Self-esteem depends in part on comparisons with others.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #10

Chapter 9 is about kinship and love.

Important distributions are made within the family or an alliance of famlies. Dowries, gifts, inheritances, alimony and mutual aid are all subject to conventional rules that reflect deep, but not permanent, understanding. They vary from place to place and historically. Such rules do not encompass the social world, but mark off the first set of boundaries within it.

The family is a sphere of special relationships. Within the family, there is considerable altruism and considerable inequality. The most radical egalitarian proposal is the abolition of the family, such as children being considered communal. Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that communism will bring about the abolition of the bourgeois family. In contrast, trade unionists and other reformers wanted to “save” existing families, at least those of the working class.

The distributive principle of romantic love is free choice. Of course, that’s not the only distributive principle for marriage. After all, there are arranged marriages. Walzer calls parents tyrants if they try to use their economic or political power to thwart the desires of their children. It is sometimes called “emotional tyranny.”

If children are free to love and marry as they please, there must be a social space for their choices. The specific spaces vary from place to place and have historically. In today’s Western world, the “date” is the most common form of courtship. If the case of a promenade, it is a sort of “market.”

Walzer further addresses the place or role of woman and nepotism.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #9

Chapter 8 is about education.

Every human society educates its children, its new and future members. Education expresses our deep wishes to continue and improve human life. The purpose of education per Aristotle is to reproduce in each generation the type of character that will sustain the constitution [me: configuration and characteristics]. The members of society are likely to disagree about what the constitution is, what it is becoming, and what it should be. If schools served to reproduce society exactly as it is, then a more just distribution of education wouldn’t make sense.

Schools, teachers, and ideas provide a context for critical understanding of living in a society. Schools fulfill an intermediate space between family and society.

We can think of educational equality as a form of welfare provision, where all children, conceived as future citizens, have the same need to know, and where the ideal of membership is best served if they are all taught the same things. Simple equality is connected to need; all future citizens need an education. Schooling provides the common currency of political and social life, of equal citizenship. Simple equality is entirely inappropriate as soon as the core has been grasped, the common end achieved. After that, education must be shaped to the interests and capacities of the individual students. Specialized or professional education is necessarily a monopoly of the talented, or at least the capable. This is a legitimate monopoly.

He describes George Orwell’s experience as a negative example of education. He was educated in a prep school, expected to later attend an elite university, where higher ranking civil servants and professionals were educated. In effect it was to a large extent a commercial enterprise. The owners of the Crossgates school Orwell attended admitted a few non-paying or reduced tuition students to bolster Crossgates’ academic prestige. Orwell was one. He was invited into a system in which the highest qualifications were hereditary. Wealthy parents were, in effect buying advantages for their children, who were taught to claim the privileges as a matter of right. Orwell described it as a perfect illustration of the tyranny of wealth over class and learning.

Schools can never be entirely free, but there should be constraints in other distributive spheres, for example, on what money can buy and the extent and importance of office. (Ref: #7)

I will skip the details, but Walzer in Chapter 8 comments on segregation and integration, private schools, educational vouchers, neighborhood schools, and talent tracks. All support his idea of complex justice. There are principles of justice, both practical and ideal, that are unique to this part of life in a society.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #8

Chapter 6 is about hard work. By this he means work that people don’t look for and wouldn’t choose to do if there were better alternatives. It is a “negative good” and usually carries with it poverty, insecurity, ill health, danger, or dishonor. Yet it is socially necessary work; it needs to be done, and somebody must do it. Soldiering, at least sometimes, is a special kind of hard work. It may be dangerous, with rank-and-file soldiers often recruited from the lower class, outcasts, foreigners. Mining is usually dangerous. Hard work is often done by slaves, resident aliens, and "guest workers."

Rousseau thought hard work such as soldiering, cutting sugar cane, or picking lettuce should be shared by many, tying it to being a citizen or member of a self-governing community. But he was vague about how wide the sharing and the range of work. Road building was a good example for Rousseau and his era. It was degrading work usually imposed on the poorest and politically weakest people. Men of noble birth and the bourgeoisie were exempt.

Dirty work is another variety of hard work, such as done by the untouchables in India. Walzer says it is not an appropriate goal for social policy that all dirty work that needs to be done should be shared by all. That would require an extraordinary degree of state control and interfere radically with other kinds of work. He has argued for a partial and symbolic sharing, the purpose being to break the link between dirty work and respect.

Walzer gives lengthy descriptions about Israeli kibbutzes and San Francisco Scavengers, a worker-owned cooperative that collects the garbage.

Chapter 7 is about leisure. Leisure is a good thing for part of one’s time and the freedom to have some – in the form of vacation, holidays, days for religion, and after-work hours -- is a central issue of distributive justice. Too much leisure for some, such as the idleness of those privileged with wealth and power in past centuries is a form of tyranny. I don’t know why Walzer didn’t also mention royal families, such as in Saudi Arabia, or theocracies, that exist even currently. Another topic related to leisure that he barely mentions is retirement. He gives more extended discussions of vacations and the Sabbath and their similarities and differences.

Next
Previous

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College

Trial Day 6 - What’s a bakery worth?

I wondered how the $11 million compensatory damage amount was justified. The link helped some. An economist on behalf of the plaintiffs estimated how much present and future revenue would be foregone by the bakery being branded as racist. The amount was “more than $5 million.” How the $5 million was calculated is not given. On the defense’s (Oberlin College’s) side, the value of the business was assessed at only $35,000. This was said to be based on what the bakery would have been worth between 2012 and 2016 when the Rust Belt was still in the “Great Recession” economic woes. Why whoever believed 2012-16 is relevant, but not the present, is beyond me. Being that low, it seems like an estimate only for what the store property could be sold, with nothing for the value of an ongoing business. $35,000 is even below average income for one year for one person, whereas some of the news articles indicate at least four employees. 

In my opinion the damage should be assessed similar to the way the economist did it -- on the estimated loss of income to the owners over more than a year. Of course, any estimate is necessarily rough since we can't predict the future with a high degree of accuracy. That's two futures in this case -- one given the situation now and the other as if the libel had not occurred.

Subtracting my estimate of the attorney's share from the $11 million, I estimate the Gibson's share to be about $7.33 million (2/3rds). Maybe the jury was persuaded by the economist's estimate and took into account the attorney's share when it decided on the $11 million.

Spheres of Justice #7

Chapter 5 is about office, for which he stipulatively defines as “any position in which the political community as a whole takes an interest, choosing the person who holds it or regulating the procedures by which he is chosen.”

Offices cannot or should not be appropriated by private persons, passed down in families, or sold on the market. The idea is old. In the West it developed most clearly within the Christian church in the struggle to disengage the church from feudalism. Church leaders argued that ecclesiastical positions could not be owned by feudal patrons, be given to friends and relatives, or be traded or sold.

The idea gradually descended into civil society. It was secularized in civil service jobs. Today governments control membership in many professions via licensing and enforcement of standards. In academia the means is accreditation. In principle, grades and degrees are not for sale. Offices are typically regarded as open to all and fair to all candidates as a matter of justice. It is a kind of “simple equality.” But whatever the qualifications and selection process, these should not become the basis of tyrannical claims to prestige and power.

The principle of meritocracy – for those who support it -- is that offices should be filled by those most qualified. Walzer comments on quotas, such as for blacks or women.

What makes the distribution of offices so important is that so much else is distributed along with it: honor and status, power and prerogative, wealth and comfort. When office is treated as dominant, it becomes insolence. It may be used to override distributions that are best left to the sphere of money and commodities, where personal discretion of entrepreneurs, owners and families are morally acceptable.

Next
Previous

Jury rules Oberlin College guilty of libel and owes $$$$$

Here is one of several news stories about this. Many more can be found searching with Google News. Wikipedia page.

An employee at Gibson's Bakery -- his father and grandfather own it -- chased and confronted an Oberlin College student trying to shoplift in 2016. The employee is white and the student is black. Two other black students got involved. Oberlin College is very progressive-liberal. The campus erupted in protests charging the bakery with racism. Some Oberlin College administrators and faculty actively supported the protestors. The college stopped being a customer and students boycotted. The Gibson's Bakery owners sued Oberlin College for libel and harming their business. The jury awarded the owners $11 million compensatory damages plus $33 million punitive damages! The $33 million will likely get reduced.

Political commentator and Oberlin graduate Michelle Malkin says Oberlin College "had it coming" (link).

Spheres of Justice #6

Chapter 4 is about money and commodities. I preface the following with this. First, it is my summary, Second, there is justification for considering Walzer’s writing sometimes being too sketchy. That’s hard to avoid with a bird’s eye view of times and places and many possible nuances omitted.

Money is the common means of exchange, but there are blocked exchanges in every society, things money can’t buy. Typical are human beings (slavery is not allowed); political power and influence (citizens cannot sell their votes or officials their decisions, bribery is illegal); criminal justice, freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly; marriage and procreation rights; the right to leave the community; exemptions from military service, jury duty, and other forms of communal work; political offices; basic welfare services like police protection and basic education; prizes and honors of many sorts (e.g., Congressional Medal of Honor, Pulitzer Prize, Most Valuable Player in sports); love and friendship; sales considered criminal, e.g. murder, blackmail, some drugs (97-103).

What is the proper sphere of money? What social goods are highly marketable? There have always been some – objects, commodities, services beyond what are communally provided, both staples and luxuries, goods that are beautiful or functional and durable. But we all have different particular needs, tastes, and desires. Money may be redistributed via gifts and sharing, both personal and communal. 

 

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Things can be had only with effort. Effort seems to supply ownership, at least originally. Wanting, making, owning and exchanging hang together. Individuals differ by their successes and failures in the sphere of money and commodities. But market power may spill over its boundaries, turning market power into a kind of tyranny, distorting distributions in other spheres. 

 

The marketplace, when free, awards all in accordance with the contributions we make to our own and others’ well-being (108). 

 

The man or woman who builds a better mousetrap, or opens a restaurant, or teaches on the side, is looking to earn money. Why not? Who wants to serve or satisfy others only for gratitude? It seems only right that an entrepreneur, able to provide goods and services, should reap the rewards he had in mind when he went to work. 

 

“This is, indeed, a kind of “rightness” that the community may see fit to enclose and restrain. The morality of the bazaar belongs in the bazaar. The market is a zone of the city, not the whole of the city. But it is a great mistake, I think, when people worried about the market seek its entire abolition. It is one thing to clear the Temple of traders, quite another to clear the streets” (109).

“The merchant panders to our desires. But so long as he isn’t selling people or votes or political influence, so long as he hasn’t cornered the market in wheat at time of drought, so long as his cars aren’t death traps, his shirts inflammable, this is harmless pandering. He will try, of course, to sell us things we don’t want; he will show us the best side of his goods and conceal their dark side. We will have to be protected against fraud (as he will against theft). But the exchange is in principle a relation of mutual benefit; and neither the money that the merchant makes by this or that consumer, poses any threat to complex equality – not if the spheres of money and commodities is properly bounded” (110).

Successful entrepreneurs might be considered monopolists of wealth. “Simple equality would make this sort of thing impossible, but simple equality cannot be obtained without eliminating buying and selling (and every other sort exchange relation, too” (111).

Walzer criticizes the views of social theorist Andre Gorz, who is very critical of a free market and bourgeois privatization. Gorz wants more collective decisions made by the state (113-15).

Walzer believes the more perfect the market, the smaller inequalities will be. The gross inequalities we see around us derive more from status hierarchies, organization structures, and power relation than the free market (116-17). On the other hand a radically laissez-faire economy would invade other spheres, dominating other distributive processes. He is concerned about powerful business people capturing political power or bending public officials to their will. When money carries with it control, not just goods and services, but of people, then it crosses its bounds into political power (121).

There is also a section on gifts and inheritance. I will skip saying anything about most of it, since it is about two historical societies. Anyway, the topic is where the sphere of money and commodities intersects with the sphere of family and kinship. The latter is the topic of a later chapter.

Next
Previous

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. 

Next
Prevoius 

Spheres of Justice #4

Chapter 2 is about membership.

“The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community. And what we do with regard to membership structures all our other distributive choices: it determines with who we make those choices, from whom we require obedience and collect taxes, to whom we allocate goods and services” (31).

“Membership as a social good is constituted by our understanding; its value is fixed by our work and conversation, and then we are in charge … of its distribution. [T]he choice is also governed by our relationships with strangers – not only by our understanding of those relationships but also by the actual contacts, connections, alliances we have established and the effects we have had beyond our borders” (32).

Few of us have any direct experience of what a country is or what it is to be a member. We often have strong feelings about our country, but only dim perceptions of it via symbols, offices, and representatives. It’s helpful to compare it to smaller associations more easily grasped – neighborhoods, clubs, and families.

A neighborhood is enormously complex. It is an association without an organized or legally enforceable admissions policy. Strangers may be welcomed or not welcomed, admitted or excluded. Neighborhoods might maintain cohesive culture for a generation or two on a voluntary basis, but people moving in and out may diminish the cohesion.

A feature of clubs is that they can regulate admission. Only when clubs split into factions and fighting may the state intervene. When states split, however, no legal appeal is possible; there is no superior body. Imagine states as perfect clubs, with sovereign power over their own selection process. In some states are like families rather than clubs, for in families are morally connected to members they have not chosen. A state differs from clubs and families in that it is territorial. A person with full membership in a state is a citizen.

Also in this chapter Walzer comments about immigration and emigration, aliens and naturalization, refugees, guest workers, and legal rules about these, but I will skip the details.

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #3

“[W]e should focus on the reduction of dominance – not, or not primarily, on the break-up or the constraint of monopoly” (17).

“We search for principles internal to each distributive sphere … the disregard of these principles is tyranny. To convert one good into another, when there is no intrinsic connection between the two, is to invade the sphere where another company of men and women properly rules. Monopoly is not inappropriate within the spheres. There is nothing wrong, for example, with the grip that persuasive and helpful men and women (politicians) establish on political power. But the use of political power to gain access to other goods is tyrannical.

“In formal terms, complex equality means that no citizen’s standing in one sphere or with regard to some social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good” (19).

Walzer’s three distributive principles are free exchange, desert, and need. Free exchange is open-ended; it guarantees no distributive outcome. Desert seems to require an especially close connection between particular goods and particular persons. He doesn’t say much about what are needs, but basic things like security, food and water, adequate medical care and education are good examples. Obviously children are more needful. Need does not work for many other goods. Some people want but nobody needs political power, honor and fame, sailboats, rare and expensive books or works or art, etc. A search for a hospital director focusing on the needs of the candidates rather than the staff and patients of the hospital would be improper. Other distributive criteria will always be operating alongside need, and it will always be necessary to worry about the boundaries that mark them off from one another. Every distributive criteria that is forceful meets the general rule within its own sphere, and not elsewhere (21-26).

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #2

I continue on Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice.

“Human society is a distributive community. That’s not all it is, but it is importantly that: we come together to share, divide, and exchange. We also come together to make the things that are shared, divided, and exchanged.” The making or work is distributed among us by a division of labor. Judgments about what each has rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, are never easy.

“The idea of distributive justice has as much to do with being and doing as with having, as much to do with production as with consumption, as much to do with identity and status as well as with land, capital, or personnel possessions. Different political arrangements enforce, and different ideologies justify, different distributions of membership, power, honor, ritual eminence, divine grace, kinship and love, knowledge, wealth, physical security, work and leisure, rewards and punishments, and a host of goods more narrowly and materially conceived[.] … And this multiplicity of goods is matched by a multiplicity of distributive procedures, agents, and criteria” (3).

Most societies are and have been organized on one good or a set of goods that is dominant and determines value in all spheres of distribution. He calls a good "dominant" if the individuals who have it, because they have it, can command a wide range of other goods. He calls it "monopolized" when a single person, a monarch, or a group, oligarchs successfully hold it against rivals. In a dictatorship or totalitarian society, the political rulers are dominant and they have prestige and power. In a capitalist society, capital is dominant and readily converted into prestige and power. In earlier centuries, religious authorities or royalty dominated and held prestige and power. For aristocracy, those who lay claim to breeding and intelligence are dominant. For meritocracy, those with talent and education are dominant.

Distribution is what social conflict is all about. Control of the means of production is a distributive struggle. Land and capital can be shared, divided, exchanged and used for prestige and power. Land and capital may be acquired in the marketplace, or via military or political power, religious office, or heredity. Some group of men and women – class, caste, strata, estate, alliance, or social formation – comes to possess a monopoly or near monopoly of some dominant good or a coalition of groups comes to such possession. This dominant good is more or less systematically converted into all sorts of other things – opportunities, powers, wealth, and reputations. Perhaps the ideology that justifies the situation is widely believed to be true. But resentment and resistance are almost as pervasive as belief. There are some people, perhaps many, who believe the situation is unjust, with the dominant group not entitled to its dominance (10-12).

At a societal level simple equality would require continual state intervention to break up or constrain incipient monopolies and to repress new forms of dominance. But then state power itself will become the central object of competitive struggle. Politics is always the most direct path to dominance, and political power is probably the most important, and certainly the most dangerous, good in human history. Hence the need to constrain the agents of constraint, to establish constitutional checks and balances (15).

Next
Previous

Spheres of Justice #1

I read Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer. By “spheres” he means different domains of social life – politics, economics, education, family and friends – that call for different principles of distributive justice. I found his observations of similarities and differences between the different spheres, and how principles reflected by practice have changed over centuries, both interesting and thought provoking.

Throughout history, the market has been one of the most important mechanisms for the distribution of social goods – ones that are made, exchanged, divided, or shared – but it has never been a complete system. Similarly, no state power has been so pervasive as to regulate all patterns of making, sharing, exchanging, or dividing to fully control all distribution (p. 4).

Philosophers have mostly sought a single principle, criterion or underlying unity for distributive justice. Such philosophical impulse is unavoidable, but he argues that such a search is to misunderstand the subject (p. 4).

He argues against the simple equality of egalitarianism and favors a “complex equality” with different distributive principles in different spheres.

All the book reviews on Amazon are very short. There are longer ones, but most are in journals and hence not easily, freely accessible.

Next