Michael Walzer on Inequality and Social Justice
Distributive Justice concerns the best way to
allocate goods and services in a society or political community.
Democracies, in principle, are egalitarian. But in what sense are all
citizens entitled to goods and services on an equal basis? The first way
of answering that question is called the principle of
strict equality.
Here it is held that citizens should have the same level of goods and
services because they have equal moral value as members of the political
group. The usual index for measuring this type of equality is income
and wealth. Another measure of inequality is lack of equal opportunities
(e.g. the opportunity to get a good education despite race or gender).
But it is generally income and wealth disparity that are used as
indicators of social and economic inequality, both in newspapers and
political theories.
Michael Walzer, in his book,
Spheres of Justice, doesn’t think disparity in income and wealth are,
in and of themselves,
the causes of social inequalities, and so he defines the goal of
distributive justice not as strict equality, but what he calls
complex equality.
Walzer says there’s nothing wrong with some people being wealthier
than others on the basis of competitive practices on the open market as
long as the resulting income and wealth disparities are compatible with
social justice. How can a capitalist market be made compatible with
social justice? By making sure that the marketplace remains only one
social and political sphere of goods in society among several others of
equal importance. The question isn’t how to equalize (or nearly
equalize) income and wealth, but rather how to render income and wealth
inequalities harmless in terms of their affecting access to those goods
our culture deems to be necessary to all members of the political
community, i.e. what philosophers have often called the
Common Good.
He outlines 11 goods which include membership (e.g.citizenship), needs
(e.g. security and health), education, kinship and political power. We
will look at one or two to get an idea of how this is supposed to work.
Those goods that can be left to the marketplace are called commodities
(and services).
Drawing on history, Waltzer discusses the case of a
railroad magnate, George Pullman, who built an entire town he named
after himself, Pullman, Illinois. The town had factories, a library,
medical facilities etc. Housing was not for sale but rented. All plant
workers had options to live there. But Pullman was, essentially, the CEO
of the town making all decisions except those concerning public
education. In classical economics, property or ownership goes together
with sovereignty. But a “Town” in the US of the 1880s (and still today,
of course) was considered a public democratic entity like a democratic
“Polis” or City-state in Ancient Greece, not a piece of property to be
bought, traded and sold. As such, townships are defined as being beyond
the reach of the marketplace. Indeed the Supreme Court ruled that
Pullman had to divest all but his business properties. Towns must be
organized on the basis of democratic principles in the US. Political
power is not distributed on the basis of ownership, but merit as
recognized in public elections. We don't end up with CEOs of Towns but
elected Mayors. All the legal protections of the state must apply to
the town. No one can just carve out a township in the likeness of a
feudal fiefdom, because “towns” are culturally defined as being
democratic structures here.They are plugged into the democratic
political community with its shared values, meanings and norms.
Cultural definitions of the Common Good also change over time. In the US there has
been increased sensitivity to the need for provisions to meet the
needs and interests of all members of the political community. For
example, there was a time when protection against the ravages of
fire and other forms of natural devastation were not guaranteed by the
state. If you wanted protection against fire you had to pay the fire
brigade or else they might not put a fire out on your property.
Similarly, police protection was minimal and those who could afford to
do so often hired security guards with broad rights to use weapons to
protect clients. Indeed, the shootings that occurred at more than one
workers strike were carried out by private security forces such as
Pinkerton. Our citizenship needs now includes the expectation of public
fire departments and police departments. The law is presumed to be
egalitarian in principle (if not always in practice). Law enforcement
agencies and fire departments operate in a way that goes beyond the
logic of the market: a way that addresses our needs as members of
society. So fire and police departments have to be distributed without
special considerations for the rich and powerful, in principle.
Public education emerged as a public good in the 19th century as well;
its cultural meaning was changed from being a luxury to a necessity--
part of the Common Good. Walzer argues that today healthcare is defined
culturally in much the same way that police,fire protection and public
education were defined in the 19th century—as goods whose distribution
should not be affected by the level of wealth or income any particular
person or group has. The general principle of this “Complex Equality”
(in which commodities are left to the market and culturally defined
social goods must be distributed equally) is:
“No social good X
should be distributed to those possessing some other good Y for that
reason (their possession of Y) and without regard to the meaning of X.”
So if X is public education and Y is money, I should not expect to get
education just because I have money, and for that reason alone. The same
should hold for access to healthcare, decent education, clean air and
freshwater and many other things that are rated in ways that transcend
the logic of the market.
While there will be income and wealth
disparities, these should not interfere with the logic of the community
which is normative and transcends that of the market. In order to
implement Complex Equality, it may be necessary to introduce progressive
taxation, but it is not because such redistribution is intrinsically
right or fair, but only because it subserves the ends of distributive
justice.
But just as cultural meanings and norms have changed in
ways that favor provisions of education and healthcare, couldn’t the
norms swing in the other direction? Is shared meaning or presumed value
consensus really a strong enough principle for insuring the common good in society? If Social Darwinism or
Minimal State Libertarianism becomes fashionable in 10 years, and
cultural meanings and norms change accordingly, then should we cease to
provide equally high quality education, police protection etc.? Further,
this culturally relative way of supporting social justice makes it hard
to imagine what we say to foreign countries should their norms be
undemocratic. Indeed Walzer rules out all authoritarian and totalitarian
systems a priori, fully aware that on his own account they lack the
cultural meaning systems required to address what we identify as gross
inequality.
In a later book, Walzer will try to answer the critics
who charge him with a deleterious form of cultural relativism. I will
cover that in a follow-up post in the near future. For now, Walzer may
at least have found a way to steer a middle course between
Welfare-Statism and a situation where the logic of the market is
extended to all spheres, even the ethical ones, thus making distributive
justice problematic. He may also have steered a middle path between the
unrealistic abstractions of much political philosophy and the view
from the street. But you be the judge.
