The ideal of equality has broad appeal
God has created all our souls such that they are equal. Spiritual equality has broad appeal. The law should apply to all equally. If it doesn't, some will seek to disintermediate the Law and find other ways to enforce contracts and punish wrong-doers. It is in this context that equal dignity has broad appeal. But it is also the case that people with PhDs in non-STEM subjects are our equals in stupidity and ignorance. This idea may not have broad appeal but only because we don't greatly care about soi disant savants.
– most people in liberal democratic societies claim to endorse the principle that we should be equal before the law
Nobody bothers to endorse stupid shit.
and that people should be treated with equal respect. Even defenders of the free market
NATO? The CIA? Defending stuff involves killing or incarcerating people who want to destroy it. What some stupid Professor says doesn't matter in the slightest.
often put their case in terms of equal property rights. Yet we live in a world where the gap between the haves and have-nots is growing, racism and discrimination are on the rise, and even basic democratic and legal rights are in jeopardy.
But Professors of useless subjects neither know what is actually happening nor have contributed to it in any way.
Historically, the socialist tradition, particularly the thought of Karl Marx, has been a source of inspiration for the call for greater equality.
Anybody can call for anything. It is a different matter that where the productivity of a group of people rises disproportionately, it is likely that they will gain more political power. When they speak of equality, they mean gaining the power those above them had in more ample measure.
Socialist ideas sparked revolution in many parts of the world
No. Revolutions occurred because the previous regime was shit at defending itself. The ideas that mattered had to do with who would gain more of the good things of life.
and, in many countries where capitalism persisted, socialist ideas about people’s equal entitlement to have their needs met prompted radical reform, in the form of social welfare guarantees such as socialised medicine, unemployment benefits and pensions.
No. Where productivity had risen for a particular group, they was some degree of 'risk pooling' and collective insurance. The plain fact is, 'National Insurance' or 'Social Security' schemes were funded by an industrial proletariat which was significantly more productive than its agricultural or lumpen progenitors. Director's Law states that the better off off section of the group financing a collective insurance scheme or a public provision of 'merit goods' get the lion's share of the benefits. All this had become obvious fifty years ago. The working class discovered that the Left was useless. Thatcher and Reagan triumphed. Then the Chinese embraced the market and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty at an astonishing rate. The Soviet Union collapsed. South Korea became democratic and affluent. North Korea starved.
To be fair, Socialism had always been a zombie ideology. The premise was that proper 'risk pooling' for the proletariat meant either a Planned Economy or Keynesian policies ensuring full employment without which there would be a 'reserve army' of unemployed driving wages down to subsistence levels (the so called 'iron law'). This 'just so' story was stupid shit. Actual insurance markets don't work like that. It is easy to find difficult to disguise 'costly signals' so you get separating equilibria. Also, for a reason Akerlof discovered, employers pay 'efficiency wages'. Thus, the working class, if rational, shouldn't have given two farts for the unemployment statistics. But it wasn't till about 1982, that everybody had to admit that blue-collar folk were rational in precisely this manner. They genuinely didn't give two farts about unemployment. At that point, Leftist economists gave up any pretence of engaging with actual economics. Political Philosophy was the mentally retarded sister of Lefty Econ. One day, Rawls touched it in its no-no pace. It screamed and screamed but nobody believed it because it had been fisting itself incessantly and drooling happily for the last hundred years.
Today, however, the Left faces a sobering philosophical landscape
as opposed to a landscape featuring snowy mountains of cocaine and deep lakes of cognac
where socialism is eclipsed by liberalism in egalitarian thought.
Apparently only tenured professors are allowed to have 'egalitarian thoughts'. The plain fact is that hundreds of millions of people around the globe have, for the first time, in two hundred years, become the equals of males of Western European descent. China is ruled by the Communist Party. Chairman Xi has done proportionately more than LBJ did for the Appalachians to raise up the material standard of living of some rural Chinese people in remote mountainous regions.
Why does nobody seem to want Chinese style Communism for Western countries? The answer is obvious. 'Catch-up' growth is one thing. It is a case of 'low hanging fruit'. Can China develop rapidly in wholly new sectors? Perhaps. But it already has a type of State Capacity most Western Countries lost fifty or sixty years ago. Can this be sustained? Probably. But, Chinese civilization is very different from ours. What they can do, it may be, we simply can't.
This is not just because of socialism’s declining fortunes in the world with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Right-wing populist parties and movements.
Goldwater and Reagan, Enoch Powell and Thatcher, Poujadism and the Yellow Vests- when have we not had populist parties and movements?
Since the publication of John Rawls’s canonical book A Theory of Justice (1971),
at a time when many Campuses had actual Maoists clutching little Red Books and some militants were attempting to radicalize factory workers or fruit-pickers and so forth.
the liberal tradition has set the terms for debate about distributive justice among Anglo-American political philosophers.
Rawls & Co. were considered senile back then. It wasn't till the Soviet Union collapsed that there was any real interest in a progressive type of 'Social Democracy' which might culminate in an 'Ordoliberal' World Order.
And Marx’s socialist slogan ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ – though stirring – remains just a slogan.
Marx said 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity is eliminated.
In 1958, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch
who had once been a member of the Communist Party before becoming boring and conventional
complained about the paucity of progressive thought in the Britain of her day in the essay ‘A House of Theory’,
There were Communist parties in Britain at that time. Many 'third world' contemporaries of Murdoch- e.g. Srimao & Indira- were moving rapidly to the Left. Oxford appeared a boring, class-ridden, backwater compared to some of the new 'red brick' campuses. Even the Fabian Society was to the left of Murdoch who was prating about morality and Aristotelian virtues. I suppose, because Murdoch didn't know Maths, she was under the impression that smart people were 'Butskellite' but, the truth is, the 'Bevanites' were winning the day because, ultimately, the Trade Unions called the shots. Wilson's first administration raised labour share of National Income to the highest percentage it had ever been. Sadly, the proletariat- which had become addicted to beach holidays in Franco's Spain, took a dim view of devaluation. Wilson tried to shift blame to the 'gnomes of Switzerland' but the man looked a bit like a gnome himself. Anyway, everybody knows the gnomes in Switzerand are kept busy biting holes in Cheese.
which appeared in a collection of radical political writings.
not radical at all. Everybody assumed Norman MacKenzie was a MI5 agent. He had briefly been a Commie. No reactionary is quite as reactionary as an ex-Red.
This was a time when British soldiers were killing Commies in Malaya and Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya. Indeed, one of the contributors to 'Convictions' wrote of witnessing a policeman shoot down an innocent Kikuyu boy scout and not being able to do anything about it despite being a White, Oxbridge educated, officer of the Colonial Service.
At that time, with British support, Rhodesia and South Africa were a paradise for the White Supremacist. As for Britain's own poor- they were being shipped off to Australia at ten pounds a pop even if they hadn't stolen a chicken or been caught in flagrante with a sheep. Meanwhile, some wide-eyed radicals were suggesting that maybe homosexuals entrapped by the police should not be castrated or incarcerated and perhaps boarding houses should not be allowed to have signs saying 'no niggers, no dogs'.
Murdoch, along with her fellow contributors, bemoaned the decline of socialist conviction, the loss of energy and vision on the Left.
She didn't know the Left.
Murdoch’s essay is largely forgotten among political philosophers,
it isn't memorable. She thought the Brits were too empirical to do theory. She didn't get that a theory is a mathematical structural causal model. Smart Brits did this just as much as Continentals. Anyway, British data-sets were better for many purposes so theory had to come to Britain to get its parameters right. Since Iris studied girly shite, she hadn't a clue as to what was actually happening around her. Consider Demmet and Farquarhson's anticipation of Gibbard Satterthwaite. It was motivated by the desire to find a voting rule for places like Northern Ireland and South Africa, not to speak of the many new multi-ethnic nation states being created by decolonization, which would defuse tribal conflict and promote cooperative outcomes. But it was mathsy so Murdoch wouldn't have understood it. She truly was useless though some people liked reading her turgid novels about the Great and the Good who were obviously neither.
but her lament is no less relevant today.
It is stupid shit. On the one hand you have Chairman Xi and on the other you have....what? Senile professors of bullshit?
Recent trends in liberal egalitarian political philosophy, for all their influence in the West,
they have no influence. Only very stupid people study that shite. Their punishment is to become Professors who have to read their brain damaged students' even stupider coprophagous dissertations.
have fallen short of adequately defending the ideal of equality,
or defending the notion that they aint as stupid as shit and utterly useless.
showing a lack of imagination in just the way noted by Murdoch.
Which is how come they aren't writing turgid novels or, at any rate, getting them published.
Furthermore, the influence of liberalism, in political philosophy, and in Western capitalist societies, is such that thinkers on the Left too often assume the necessity of these parameters.
In which case those thinkers aren't on the Left at all. Also their trousers are down around their ankles. Now they are being mounted by randy goats. Why am I still imagining this shit? Shouldn't have deleted the Pornhub app on my smartphone.
In this essay I take up Murdoch’s call for a radical vision of egalitarianism as furthering equality of human flourishing, or wellbeing.
Sadly, the lady can do no such thing. Scientists and entrepreneurs and guys who create apps can find ways such that everybody can become better off. Senile Professors of shite can merely produce yet more coprophagous shite.
I contend this will enable us to better understand and further what is at stake in the ideal of equality.
It is often remarked that, for most of the 20th century, political theory languished in the shadow of scientistic views that had dominated philosophy as a whole.
Then philosophy as a whole died off. STEM subjects were developing too rapidly for philosophers to know which previously open questions had already been closed.
Logical positivism insisted on the strict delineation of conceptual from empirical enquiry,
but what Murdoch or this lady are doing is neither
matters of fact from matters of value, themes that lingered in the succeeding school of ordinary language philosophy. Murdoch blamed the dominance of a sterile logical analysis for contributing to the lack of vision and creativity in progressive thought.
Genuinely progressive thought is scientific thought. I suppose, better 'mechanism design' can lead to more rapid scientific progress. But that is even mathsier.
Whereas moral philosophy, as Murdoch put it, ‘survived by the skin of its teeth’, turning itself into a meta-discipline concerned with understanding concepts,
Which ones? The concept of being nice? Or the concept of an inaccessible Cardinal?
political philosophy ‘almost perished’. The intrinsically controversial nature of prescriptions about justice, equality and liberty was replaced with an analysis of how words were used; gone was the ancient Greeks’ idea of political philosophy as reasoned enquiry into how we ought to live in common.
The ancient Greeks thought that if they wanted to keep living in common doing reasoned enquiry, then they were all going to have to do lots and lots of military drill and gain the ability to fuck up the Persians and the Macedonians and the Romans and so forth. Their next thought was 'fuck it. Let's just be slaves and get to tutor the Master's son in philosophy or some other such sissy shite.'
The diminished role of political philosophy as a normative exercise doubtless reflected not just an empiricist outlook in philosophy but also a smug acceptance of the empirically given, that is, the ascription of an automatic legitimacy to the liberal institutions of capitalist democracies in the postwar period. This dogmatism about politics in the liberal West that came with the Cold War helps explain why political philosophy was in a state of stagnation. As Murdoch put it, with the achievement of the welfare state, people were no longer motivated to ‘call up moral visions’, to ‘lift their eyes to the hills’.
There were plenty of religious nutters- including Maharishis- opening up various types of communes all over the place. But there were also plenty of murderous regimes inspired by particular political philosophers- e.g. Ba'athists in Iraq quoted Michel Aflaq, while Iranian revolutionaries genuflected to Ali Shariarti. Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze etc. were all considered radical at one time. But then Soros claims to be inspired by Karl Popper. If the police won't arrest people who mug you in New York you have one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society to thank.
Complacency was jolted in the US, however, in the 1960s, when the postwar liberal consensus
about what? Civil Rights? Abortion? Homosexuality? Guys with long hair smoking pot?
came under attack from both a new Left galvanised by the student movement, and a new Right that emerged from conservative critiques of welfare economics. Political philosophy was reborn with Rawls’s canonical work, providing that ‘systematic political theorising’, the absence of which Murdoch had noted more than a decade before.
America had a Dewey type pragmatism which was decidedly progressive. Indeed, first and second wave Feminism fell within its rubric. Britain's Fabian Society, which was quite broad-church and included British Hegelians in the tradition of Haldane, too was influential. Murdoch failed to make a mark as a thinker but was successful as a novelist. This was a period when a Grammar School teacher might become a Labour MP or a producer for the Beeb or else go off to Malaya and turn into Anthony Burgess. Back then, when a Ken Barlow returns from Uni to Coronation Street, he sticks out like a sore thumb. But, very soon, people understood that he was a boring prat. Within ten years, the Grammar School teacher in 'Secret Lemonade drinker' is glad to quit teaching so as to run a launderette. Education is for stupid people. Sir James Goldsmith, considered a thicko and a spiv by the British establishment, had to cross the pond to gain recognition as a highly articulate and persuasive champion of shareholder value. Billionaires, it seemed no longer need mouthpieces. Why listen to the monkey when you can hear from the organ grinder?
I propose, however, that perhaps it was a pyrrhic victory.
Rawls gave stupid philosophers a bridge to 'Social Choice' theory which, by the late Seventies, was known to be nonsense. Econ Journals stopped publishing yet another 'impossibility proof'. The difference between 'Liberal' utopias and the proper kind was that the Liberals had to pretend that people would be crazy enough to agree to commit to their stupid shit. But, anyone who can work out why a Timeshare won't save you money can also work out why no one would agree to anything save for immediate consideration. Other sorts of Utopias were fine because they were premised on not 'public justification' but the fucking extermination of large sections of the public.
Rawls’s theory gave priority to classical fundamental liberties yet married them with redistributive principles to mitigate disadvantage.
Sadly, nobody told Rawls that 'fundamental liberties' are very expensive to maintain. Ask the Ukrainians. If they hadn't been so desperate for America's financial support, they would never have given up their nukes. That's why they are now having to fight so hard for basic freedoms we would be foolish to continue to take for granted.
In so doing, Rawls provided a robust justification for the liberal welfare states of democratic capitalist societies throughout the West,
No. Look at the fine print. Rawls is cool with price and service provision discrimination where there are non-convexities. The other thing is that high time preference means negative risk aversion. Proles and degenerate scum may choose Borges's lottery in Babylon behind the veil of ignorance. Better an interesting, but brief, life than a life of thrift and enterprise and being as boring as shit..
and his profound influence, in both theory and practice, continues to this day.
Sadly, the theory was shit and the practice coprophagy.
Rawls’s defence of equality
the fool hadn't heard of insurance markets or other types of hedges. Only if they don't exist would be stupid enough to stipulate for maximizing the welfare of the least well off.
Insurance markets also drive innovation so as to actually actively reduce risk and uncertainty. The math has moved forward a lot on this. Incidentally, Rawls's solution is an example of the 'maximal uncertainty principle'. But reducing uncertainty is a good thing. Thus his solution is the worst possible unless you are speaking of a bunch of drooling, degenerate, retards. Still, it would be cool if everybody who goes to Grad Skool in this useless shite made a pre-compact to share and share alike no matter where they ended up in life.
in the context of capitalist market societies, however, was achieved at the cost of scaling back both the scope and ideals of egalitarian thought, falling far short of the imaginative enterprise sought by Murdoch.
God alone knows what she sought apart from lots and lots of booze and lots and lots of dick.
For Murdoch, the desire for human equality was a crucial source of the ‘moral energy’ of past socialist movements.
Sadly, even more 'moral energy' went into the desire to acquire nice shiny stuff or ensure your kids had plenty of nice shiny stuff. If you came home and said 'Mummy, today I deliberately got a C in my Test so that all the kids in my class would have an equal outcome', she would slap the black off you.
No doubt some stupid Professors who were earning way less than their pals who had qualified as Surgeons or Actuaries or Corporate Lawyers pretended they were expending 'moral energy' on promoting liberty or equality or fraternity or sodomy for seniors or whatever.
Since Rawls, however, although their views are dubbed ‘egalitarian’, few liberal philosophers call for socioeconomic equality per se.
Coz their teaching assistants are as poor as shit and would love to get a share of their pay check.
Rawls’s Theory of Justice proposes that, if we reasoned about justice in a thought experiment where we do not know our talents, race or class, we would opt for
Policemen who quickly catch bad guys and Judges who sentence them to death or long spells of hard labour.
If asked about economic policy, we may stipulate that smart guys who understand business and technology should be in charge of Industrial policy, while experienced accountants look after the budget and you have senior bankers sitting on the monetary policy committee and so forth.
What would be crazy is to think that 'Justice' involves deciding how to divide a cake which hasn't been baked and which, in fact will never be baked, if Courts could take it away from the guys who bake it.
a ‘difference principle’ where inequalities are permitted, but only if they benefit the worst-off.
This is a matter of policy not of Justice. The difference is that policy changes when circumstances change whereas Justice does not (though 'sentencing policy' or 'public interest' certification' may change).
When it comes to the 'worst off', what we need to do is to address the things which might make them 'worst off'- illness, addiction, lack of education and training, etc. etc. Redistribution is not the answer.
However, suppose all the cool countries are taking the Rawlsian path, we may too may do so for fear that cool peeps will exit our jurisdiction. That is a matter of policy, not justice.
If it turns out, for example, that human motivations are such that incentives are required for the talented to be productive, then so be it: we should pay the talented more than the rest of us.
We don't pay the talented more. We buy stuff made by the talented people and, if they have a good contract, they end up with lots of money.
Better, says Rawls, to have a larger aggregate of resources with which to improve the situation of the worst-off – a bigger though unequally divided pie – than equality per se.
In which case it may be even better to tell the worst-off to fuck off and die while investing the money that would have gone to them so there is a bigger pie for productive folk. This causes the 'worst-off' to try to appear productive or pleasing in some way. There is a mimetic effect which may, by itself, cause the under-class in a society to pull itself up by the bootstraps and become more and more productive. Otherwise, it fucks off and dies or becomes concentrated in the market for crime or dick sucking.
In The Morality of Freedom (1986), the legal philosopher Joseph Raz complained that equality is an empty concept, susceptible to justifying the absurdity of ‘levelling down’. Levelling down means that, given a commitment to strict equality, widespread poverty is preferred over unequal wealth, even if everyone, including the less advantaged, would be better off under an unequal distribution. Raz’s objection captured a growing sense that, unless one could adduce evidence that, in fact, an unequal distribution would impose hardship on the worst-off, equality per se should not be our goal.
Nobody was listening to the fellow. Reagan, yes. Raz- fuck off.
Accordingly, many liberals went even further than Rawls, taking the view that the question of relative shares is irrelevant; what matters is only if people have a sufficiency. Even those who agree that it matters how much one person has, compared with another, tend to dispense with equality per se. In Ronald Dworkin’s theory, social insurance is needed to remedy the inegalitarian effects of luck and opportunity, but there will be inequality; it would be absurd, Dworkin says in Sovereign Virtue (2000), to exact the very high taxes required to insure against the likelihood of not being a movie star. In general, liberal egalitarians either start with equality but depart from it, or assume inequality and aspire to mitigate it. All in all, the principle of equal distribution of resources is largely abandoned.
As Chairman Deng said, 'to get rich is glorious'. If you were an actual billionaire, it was cool to pretend you believed everybody should have a nice bucket of caviar to eat when sitting on the deck of their super-yacht. But if you were a Professor, people laughed at you if you suggested anything similar. Virtue signalling is only worthwhile if you have great wealth and less virtue than an elderly, drug addled, rent-boy.
Rawls scaled back egalitarianism in another respect, taking the view that principles of justice should concern the distribution of the means to one’s pursuits,
For fuck's sake, why? Justice isn't about economics. Why not say the principles of Medicine should determine Monetary policy?
without taking an interest in the pursuits themselves. Both liberal political theory and the liberal state should be ‘neutral’ about people’s plans of life, Rawls argued in Political Liberalism (1993).
How the fuck is the State supposed to recruit Civil Servants and Soldiers and so forth if it is 'neutral' about their plan of life?
This aversion to invoking considerations about wellbeing is widely shared among liberal philosophers. Indeed, in A Matter of Principle (1985), Dworkin had ventured an egalitarian rationale for political neutrality: the ‘television-watching, beer-drinking’ citizen’s plan of life should not count any less than the plans of life of the intellectual or the aesthete. Market mechanisms, not normally thought to promote equality,
unlike customary arrangements where the high born got everything while the low-born laboured as serfs
were commended by egalitarians for their indifference to people’s choices, their even-handedness towards all plans of life.
This is foolish. The market greatly rewards those whose plan in life is to make and sell lots of cool or useful stuff. It punishes those whose plan in life is to quit their job and focus on eating their own shit.
Liberal egalitarians’ resistance to incorporating ideas of living well in their philosophical doctrines doubtless reflected an understandable unease with the repressive and intolerant strains in US political culture, a fear that bigoted moral views would be enforced on others. The idea that one’s life goes best if led from ‘the inside’, according to one’s own plans and goals, had much to do with the influences on the outside in the US – where ideas of the good life are derived from convictions about the right to bear arms, not being ‘un-American’, the denial of women’s bodily autonomy, bible-thumping, and repressive notions of salvation. But the result has been an inability to confront the fundamental question of the inequalities in how people live, what Murdoch eloquently called ‘the power to imagine what we know’.
Murdoch lacked that power. She knew all sorts of sciencey stuff was going down but could not imagine how that stuff worked because she had studied useless shit.
Rawls’s ideas about individual choice generated further constraints on egalitarian thought.
Nonsense! Genuine egalitarians are concerned with removing the causes of inequality- e.g. inventing medicines so I can lead a normal life rather than be confined to my bed as an invalid. Their thinking is not constrained by stupid shit Rawls or some other such tosser wrote.
He stressed that people were responsible for their plans of life and the extent to which fulfilment might come with one plan rather than another.
We all know that our plans depend on other people's plans. That is why we gravitate to 'Schelling focal' solutions to coordination problems. But Political Philosophy shat the bed. It became focal only for a discoordination game involving coprophagous shitheads craving credentials of a fraudulent type.
At the same time, Rawls coined the evocative expression the ‘natural lottery’ to capture how people’s talents and temperaments are unequally but arbitrarily allocated and thus not the basis for unequal reward.
His focus on the worst-off was a no-strings-attached view, but liberal egalitarians since Rawls have argued that a theory of justice should focus on his theme of arbitrariness and responsibility more precisely. Dworkin proposed that inequalities that result from the unpredictable vagaries of ‘brute luck’ are properly the object of egalitarian policy, but inequalities that are due to ‘option luck’, that is, due to people’s choices, are not owed compensation.
This is foolish. We want to improve both outcomes and choice selection. I can now buy things I need much more cheaply because of price comparison sites. Previously, I was bad at managing my budget and buying appliances etc of good quality at competitive prices. Those who improve technology help those who did not do well in nature's lottery as well as impulsive and foolish people like me who tended to make sub-optimal choices.
A community may offer humanitarian assistance to the hapless squanderers of resources, but it is not required to by justice.
What is required by justice is not robbing or raping people or acting negligently etc. It simply isn't true that Justice or Medicine or Plumbing has anything to say about fiscal policy.
At issue, Dworkin says, is a principle of responsibility; we cannot expect to be protected from failure if we risk or make poor use of our resources.
‘Luck egalitarianism’, as this concession to inequalities came to be called, proceeded to dominate egalitarian thought, even drawing the approval, surprisingly, of thinkers from the Left, like G A Cohen, who in 1989 congratulated Dworkin for ‘the considerable service’ he had performed for egalitarianism in incorporating ideas ‘of choice and responsibility’ from ‘the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right’. Such a rationale is a far cry from the ‘general revolt against convention’ that Murdoch celebrated about socialist movements in the past.
Those Socialist movements envisaged a more rational and scientific way of organizing society. The problem was that 'information aggregation' and 'preference revelation' were difficult or impossible to do and anyway the mathematics of computing the general equilibrium was bedevilled by issues to do with complexity, concurrency, computability and was, in any case, 'anything goes' because of income and hedging effects. The Socialist calculation debate is over. The Left lost. Get over it.
True, Left-wing luck egalitarians stress the great extent of brute bad luck, to argue that their position actually dictates significant redistribution of wealth. Cohen went so far as to propose that the arena of luck included affinity for expensive pursuits. For example, playing a sport that involves costly equipment (think of the misfortune of being a Canadian hockey parent) should not be considered a matter of mere choice. Moreover, in the case of global justice, factors like climate are examples of bad brute luck meriting significant redistribution (see, for example, its application to global justice by the philosopher Kok-Chor Tan).
There has been no 'significant redistribution'. What is the point of talking about it?
Yet for all these generous interpretations on the part of Left-wing interpreters, it remained that luck egalitarianism, in one form or another, tended to dominate egalitarian thought. Even the doctrine’s critics, such as Elizabeth Anderson, agreed that a satisfactory egalitarian theory must dispense with ideas of receiving goods without an obligation to produce them.
There is no such obligation in law or anything else. The thing is foolish.
Context is again relevant. The luck-egalitarian creed was born in the ‘New Right’ era of the 1980s and ’90s, which saw the election, with working-class support, of the Right-wing leaders Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US,
who the fuck voted for Heath or Nixon? The working class has always supported some right wing leaders over shittier leftists.
and the ensuing move to the Right of social-democratic parties like the Labour Party in Britain, a move that in the years since has arguably been compounded rather than reversed.
Corbyn was an old Bennite anti-EU nutter.
Perhaps it seemed a good strategy to exclude from one’s doctrine of equality, even if only conceptually, what conservatives called ‘welfare bums’, people whose poverty was deemed to be in some sense their fault.
They were reclassified as disabled. It is too expensive to screen them out though no doubt some ended up in dire need or died 'deaths of despair'.
What Murdoch sardonically called the ‘dangerous region of “mushy” thinking’, in all its senses, could then be averted.
Her brain was made of mush. Maybe she just drank too much.
Though it made an important contribution to understanding the injustice of economic disadvantage, I believe liberal philosophy clipped the wings of the egalitarian ideal.
No. Guys who studied STEM subjects at Uni invented cool new stuff and some became very very rich. People wanted to hear from them, not Professors of worthless shite.
First, let’s return to our original question of equality in the allocation of goods. It is interesting to note that Marx, too, rejected strict equality in distribution, but for reasons unlike those of Rawls. Given the diversity of human needs, Marx argued that equal shares would simply aggravate inequality. Indeed, giving the brawny rugby player the same diet as his diminutive grandmother affords them equal shares, but leaves them unequally fed.
Marx understood that Micawber is poor because he has many dependents. If the poor don't have kids or have just one or two, chances are, they won't be poor.
The idea that true equality involves differential treatment, however, was no mere ‘sufficientarian’ or ‘prioritarian’ position, in the words of Pablo Gilabert and Richard Arneson, respectively. Equal wellbeing is, after all, the ultimate goal in the socialist picture.
No. Socialism said it would create a better world for everybody with the proles getting the biggest proportionate increase in living standards. Capitalism says the same thing. The law of diminishing marginal utility explains why this must be the case for any type of labour productivity based growth absent monopsony.
In calling for a nuanced approach to the problem of economic disparities, Marx was a thoroughgoing egalitarian where liberal egalitarians are not.
No. Marx believed he had discovered a set of laws for Capitalist economics. He was wrong.
Rawls permits departures from equality on pragmatic, not moral, grounds, justified only insofar as they benefit the worst-off. But why should there be any such departures? At a time when the gap between rich and poor is especially yawning, the incentive argument seems particularly hollow.
But we wouldn't be where we are if Rawls had been right about what rational people would want for Society.
The gap between the poor in rich countries and the poor elsewhere is yawning. This is causing mass migration which drives down real wages for those people which is why they may vote for Trump.
Indeed, Left-wing egalitarians like Cohen contend that, when the ‘high-flyers’ insist that their productivity necessitates they keep a greater share to themselves, they are betraying bad faith with the egalitarian project, indeed engaging in a kind of blackmail; this hardly counts as a principle of justice.
If Cohen redistributed his income with poorer employees of his College, then he said this in good faith. If not, he was a hypocrite.
Cohen invokes the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ – how justice requires that individuals be committed to its ideals in their everyday lives. As he evocatively put it: ‘If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?’
How come you make more money than custodial staff or Teaching Assistants? Share your pay-packet with them. Don't forget to add in any royalties you get from your book sales. However, if you actually do this, people would say 'why are you wasting your time teaching shit? You are a good man. People would entrust money to you to do first order good. Concentrate on that.'
Incentive arguments take for granted that narrowly selfish, monetary interests will always be the principal motivation for human beings.
No. They take for granted that a guy who can earn a lot has a high opportunity cost for his time. Instead of making money he could be making a big name for himself in some other sector because of 'portable' skills he possesses.
This is a long way from the idea of ‘true community life’, as Murdoch put it, that was inherent in the ideal of equality for the Left. Liberal preoccupations with restricting eligibility for egalitarian redress conjure up odious Victorian notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.
They weren't odious at all. They caused the working class to cultivate the 'respectable' virtues of thrift, abstinence, chastity, enterprise, studying stupid shit so as to appear of a better class and so on and so forth. As Samuel Butler pointed out, punishing the poor causes the poor to stop being so fucking poor.
But what about the undeserving rich, those who are lucky enough to inherit wealth?
This silly lady doesn't get that Mummies and Daddies make babies. When rich Mummies and Daddies make a baby, they do so with the intention of raising a child who will be rich. This has nothing to do with luck.
Moral justification cannot be mustered for cases of good brute luck enriching people,
Nor can it justify my good brute luck that my Mummy was a woman with a soft voice and a sweet face rather than a big bearded man. Strangely, all babies tend to have that same 'good brute luck'. I wonder why?
let alone cases where the rich owe their wealth to exploitative behaviour.
the poor, too, may owe their poverty to their exploitative behaviour. I refused to help my work colleagues and spent my time reading porn at my desk. Then I got the sack because everybody in the company thought I was an exploitative fucking parasite. Now, I'm as poor as shit.
And think of the many ways in which governments subsidise capitalist companies; there are ‘corporate welfare bums’ as identified by David Lewis, a Canadian social-democratic politician active in the 1970s.
Back then stupid politicians thought preventing 'mass unemployment' was important. This could mean paying Companies to employ people and then picking both their pockets by way of higher taxes. The result was yet more 'stagflation'.
It seems odd indeed that egalitarian attention is focused on the so-called irresponsible behaviour of the poor.
It is odd to bother with those nutters.
No one denies or even moralises cancer treatment to the lifelong smoker,
Yes they do.
or knee surgery to the extreme skier
We laugh at the cunt- if it is safe to do so.
In any case, people may be making imprudent decisions ‘according to their ability’,
anyone with any genuine ability would run away from a field which only exists so Socioproctologists can ridicule it.
as Marx’s communist principle put it. If we reflect on the choices we have made in our lives, be they wise or foolish, and the conditions under which we made them, it is difficult to isolate the effects of luck.
Fair point. This lady became a Professor the only way she could- viz. by studying and then teaching stupid shite. Even if she had been lucky enough to get into a useful line of work, she wouldn't have been smart enough to stay employed.
Parents, friends and mentors, education, locale and situation all influence our choices; indeed, capacity to choose is arguably itself unchosen. (This was Rawls’s thinking in his notion of the natural lottery: ‘Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent on happy family and social circumstances’, while Keith Dowding invokes ‘relative parenting pushiness’ as an example that tracks cultures, but also diversity within cultures, that suggest it’s ‘hard to disentangle luck and responsibility’.) Questions of responsibility are hard to determine in light of what we know about the impact of social class, the culture of the chronically poor, the challenges of initiative and enterprise under straightened circumstances.
The same point may be made about political philosophers. Their capacity to choose is compromised by the intense stupidity of their milieu. We must disregard anything they are constrained to say. They can't choose save to babble nonsense.
The school of luck egalitarianism has been responsive to criticism, elaborating further the idea of insurance provisions to protect people from the consequences of their bad choices. Yet such remedies raise the question of why choice is being adduced in the first place, even as a conceptual possibility. The most cash-strapped, inadequate systems of socialised medicine in capitalist democracies do not attach conditions of prudence for the distribution of healthcare; no one denies, triages or even moralises cancer treatment to the lifelong smoker, or knee surgery to the extreme skier.
But healthcare systems collapse or abruptly ration provision. Morality goes out of the window when the money runs out. Illness imposes extra costs on the ill even if current regulations don't necessarily inflate their 'deductible'. Reducing 'moral hazard', however, is a requirement for every type of insurance scheme other wise those with more positive traits exit while losers enters.
Instead of thinking about accounting for disadvantages in a ledger of responsibility or haplessness, the socialist R H Tawney wrote in the 1930s that the equal society should not get mired in the ‘details of the counting-house’. Murdoch’s remark that ‘we have not mended our society since its mutilation by 19th-century industrialism’ is an apt reflection on
her utter stupidity. Without industrialism the productivity of the proletariat would not have increased so greatly that it could afford to insure itself albeit at a minimal level.
the mean-spirited attitude threatened by luck egalitarianism, which seems a far cry from socialist ideals of solidarity, trust and generosity.
These stupid shitheads think that the rich decided to help the poor. They didn't get that working people were typically paying more into the Social Security fund than they would themselves take out. It is a different matter that Social Insurance itself raised productivity but the credit must go to the people who financed that Insurance and voted for it- viz. the industrial proletariat.
The socialist tradition appreciates the extent of the disadvantages of social class, how they limit the options available to a person, who must sacrifice long-term opportunities for the sake of immediate material needs, whose family background renders some opportunities unimaginable, who is discouraged by teachers who underestimate their abilities. It seems a tragic irony that contemporary liberal theories of egalitarianism seem to embrace not Marx’s communist ideal of distribution according to need but Stalin’s repurposed maxim that ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat.’
Stalin starved plenty of people who worked very hard but he did it as a matter of policy. This silly lady thinks the main problem people in the Soviet Union faced was 'teachers underestimating abilities' rather than the Gulag.
The equal community is best guided instead by a ‘social ethos’, where people undertake a personal commitment to the egalitarian project,
Cults require 'personal commitments' to do stupid shit. Liberal Societies allow their members to tell wannabe Messiahs to shove their 'social ethos' up their poopers and just fuck the fuck off.
contributing as best they can, and displaying a generous attitude to their fellows. In Why Not Socialism? (2009),
Why not Jonestown?
Cohen illustrates this with the delightful example of a camping trip where there is ‘collective property and planned mutual giving’. The campers’ flourishing
or the flourishing of a cult till the Koolaid is poured out
requires that all share the fruits of their prudence, capacity and luck, be it knowhow about the best fishing hole, or equipment when it comes to the hapless unprepared camper. (Of course, this ideal is at odds with Cohen’s luck egalitarian view, which Cohen admitted he could not resolve.) I will not tackle further the problems of luck egalitarianism here; but my own human flourishing approach in Equality Renewed (2017) eschews the distinction between option and brute luck as a criterion for the remedy of disadvantage.
This lady may think she is flourishing. But is she really? Being a Professor sounds like a high IQ job. Then they find out what she teaches and they understand she is a cretin.
This brings us to the question of the place of human wellbeing in our understanding of equality.
She has no fucking understanding of anything at all.
We saw how Rawls and his colleagues reduced the scope of equality in that respect, too. Indeed, liberals like Rawls and Dworkin could be said to promote a kind of juridicalisation of political thought,
which is why people thought their shit might have an impact on jurisprudence. Maybe the next generation of Supreme Court judges would be brainwashed by the Libtards. The opposite happened.
where legalistic notions of neutrality and personal responsibility barred questions of community and substantive value.
Judges can take cognizance of both. There is such a thing as Public Interest Litigation. Too much of it, and Regulatory Agencies go for a narrow definition of locus standi- e.g. only entertaining complaints from those within a mile of the impugned unit.
In the face of the persisting, profound inequalities of capitalist societies today, it is worth considering a more ambitious vision that better captures what’s at stake when people have unequal income, and that can engage ordinary people in their political commitments.
There is no point considering any vision produced by shitheads.
Liberal squeamishness about what’s been dubbed a ‘perfectionist’ creed is understandable given, as already noted, intolerant conceptions of the good rampant in US society, but also given historic exemplars like Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche, who contended that the nature of the good was grasped only by the few. In its pursuit of equality, the socialist tradition, in contrast, takes a broad view of the reach and scope of human wellbeing, focusing on goods and resources, respect and equal participation, but also non-alienated, fulfilling and valuable pursuits for all.
There was a time when there were smart, young, technocratic Socialists. Now there are senile fools and crazy Corbynistas and drug addled Bernie bros.
The socialist critique of capitalism takes seriously not just impoverishment, but the impoverished lives that people are forced to live under conditions of inequality.
But lives were even more impoverished in anti-capitalist shitholes.
Marx’s case against capitalism centred on how material deprivation resulted in the affront to the ‘nobility of man’, how alienating work makes people ‘stupid and one-sided’ and allows for the ‘overturning of individualities’.
Marx was poor. He was stupid and one-sided. That's true enough. Still, Marxism turned into a great engine for producing poverty and tyranny. That must be some consolation.
The ideal of communism involved creative labour and community as well as the satisfaction of basic needs. Murdoch remarked decades ago that, for ordinary people, ‘work has become less unpleasant without becoming more significant’. That is still true today. The Victorian aesthete William Morris
an artist- a very industrious one- not a fucking aesthete at all
came to his socialist convictions in his analysis of how capitalism condemned people to lives of ugliness – in their work, but also in their homes, relationships and communities.
Morris set up cottage industries which generated quite decent livelihoods.
Socialism, in contrast would aspire to all living well in surroundings conducive to human flourishing.
Christianity didn't stop at aspiration. It actually lifted up entire communities and countries by propagating thrift, abstinence, enterprise, and other such virtues.
It was not just Marxists who put human flourishing at the centre of their political aims. Living well undergirds the original rationale for the welfare state, as evident in the British economist William Beveridge’s concern that problems of ‘idleness’ and ‘squalor’ be addressed by postwar social policy.
Beveridge's parents had shown similar concerns in India. Sadly, Nehru's India went in a Socialist direction and became unable to feed or defend itself.
His Labour colleague, the political theorist Harold Laski,
a shithead. Indians heeded that fool to their lasting harm.
also purported that the remedy of inequality would involve a ‘high level of general culture’ since civilisation is ‘a common enterprise which is the concern of all’, enabling people to lead lives of dignity. In contrast, even the most rousing radical critiques of liberal egalitarianism today – such as Anne Phillips’s call for ‘equality without conditions’, or Nicholas Vrousalis’s freedom-focused critique of capitalism – seem to accept the neutralist creed insofar as they eschew the perfectionist dimensions of the socialist tradition. Perhaps they are daunted by what Murdoch decried as the ‘demand for precision’ in postwar philosophy that inhibits bold approaches, compounded by an unease, perhaps with the possibility of seeming to be unrealistic or extravagant in one’s claims.
This is nonsense. Smart technocrats could always get a hearing. The problem was that private corporations could implement those ideas faster and better than lumbering Government agencies. That's how come Atomic or Green Energy and Information Technology and Fintech ain't in the public sector even where it had first mover advantage and cheaper finance.
It is worth noting, however, that, for all their egalitarian shortfalls, liberal societies in this case too are not cowed by the strictures of liberal theory. Liberal philosophers’ squeamishness about making judgments about human wellbeing is in contrast with how liberal societies take a broad view of their responsibilities to their citizens, prepared to encourage some ways of life and discourage others. Public libraries, parks, galleries and museums all receive state support as a means of enabling people to engage in valuable pursuits, and these policies attract little controversy.
Because they represent an item on the budget which is not 'material'. But if deficits balloon, the axe will fall on the little things just as much as on the big things.
Human wellbeing pertains to where and how we live, whether we have autonomy and self-realisation in our work, our means of transit, the support we have for raising children, the shape of our leisure time, our physical and mental health.
This is not specifically human wellbeing at all. A cart-horse may prefer to wander around autonomously while being supported with carrots for any mental health issues it might have. By contrast, human wellbeing has a lot to do with not having to deal with stupid assholes or else being able to tell them they are stupid and should just fuck off and die already.
People can fail to flourish because they lack meaningful relationships; alienation and loneliness are rife in our times, where many lack genuine friendship and love, for all the opportunities for Facebook ‘friends’, dating apps and options to sext or hook up. Murdoch anticipated these issues back in 1958:
though she hooked up with anything with a pulse
‘A stream of half-baked amusements hinders thought and the enjoyment of art and even of conversation.’
What hindered my enjoyment of her art was the fact that it was shit. There were flashes of talent but that was all. Still, there were good parodies of her in the New Statesman. Then her husband wrote a long book explaining that the crazy drunken nympho had never really had much in the brain department.
As we become aware of issues of depression and anxiety, and that many of us, particularly those on the autism spectrum,
is this lady on the spectrum? But some autistic people are really bright. Political Philosophy is for hypo mechanistic hebephrenic peeps who enjoy finger painting with their own faeces.
struggle with social connections, it seems especially urgent that we attend to inequality in wellbeing in all its dimensions. True, some of us cannot help but be sad sacks, with a tendency to cheerlessness. Nonetheless, we should be attentive to how inequality in wellbeing is the result of factors over which society can exert considerable influence.
Very true. Instead of just a few people being Professors of shite subjects, every drooling cretin should share the office and emoluments of such Professors.
Moreover, an ‘egalitarian flourishing’ view can tackle the problem of responsibility, not to disqualify people from amelioration of their disadvantage, but to assist the more vulnerable so that they can enjoy the flourishing that comes with contributions to society. Once we steer away from the allocation of goods
which Marx understood should only happen after scarcity has disappeared. Once we have limitless free electricity and self-assembling nano-technology based 3 D printers are ubiquitous, we can make only the things we want to make and give them away to who ever takes a fancy to them.
and focus instead on the constituents of flourishing, recent ‘postwork’ literature should prompt us to give up productivist preoccupations and embrace a broad view of worthwhile contribution, be it that of the surgeon,
I don't think this lady would be too keen on a cretin performing surgery on her. The best surgeon and the best football player etc. will still command some type of premium. If this is not a money premium, it may be one which has to do with social prestige. The super-talented will be an exclusive self-dealing club. Indeed, in some respects they already are. Elton John isn't going to show up to sing at my birthday party though he may be happy to do so for Oprah Winfrey.
the surfer or the social worker, the intellectually challenged person or the brilliant artist. Inspired by Marx’s ideals of all-round development and socialist community,
which we can't and mustn't have now because scarcity exists. We need to tackle things like the Climate Crisis and first invent Quantum Computers and 'cold fusion' and self assembling 3 D printers before we can start pursuing a Utopian plan for Society.
a flourishing approach suggests a radical answer to a range of egalitarian issues, a robust alternative to the liberal view of political community as playing no role in people’s choices about how to live.
In sum, with his canonical treatise on justice, Rawls resuscitated political philosophy,
No. He suggested that Courts and Legislatures should use a rule which would favour the least well off. At a later point there was also the notion of intersectionality, i.e. those who were worse off in more than one way should receive more help. Currently, there is some talk of reparations for the suffering of one's ancestors.
but perhaps he did so by keeping it semiconscious. For in banning controversy about value from the domain of public debate, egalitarian political philosophy became curiously apolitical, burdened by an outlook of modest ambitions and imagination that seems ill-prepared to address the deep inequalities of capitalist societies or to motivate the activism necessary to facilitate social change.
Voters had turned against 'redistribution' because it just meant more and more stagflation and industrial action and 'Welfare Queens' and muggers running amok.
Cowed by the gains of the political Right and conservatives’ hostility to utopianism, still permeated by the legacy of scientistic philosophy, liberal egalitarianism is rather thin gruel for the aspiration to a society where people may flourish as equals. Murdoch notes her society’s ‘loss of religion as a consolation and guide’.
Though Society still banned homosexuality and abortion for mainly religious reasons. Indeed, the offence of blasphemy was only abolished quite recently in the UK mainland though it remains in force in Northern Ireland.
Indeed, in the search for meaning in the largely secular societies of the West, liberal theory has left a void, leaving working people to find moral purpose in fundamentalist religion,
Just as they did hundreds of years ago
Right-wing populism, xenophobic and authoritarian creeds.
All of these pre-existed bien pensant liberalism.
Egalitarians can and should do better.
They should be talking about how they have discovered cold fusion or invented a better quantum computer. We listen to people who have made amazing discoveries because they are smarter than us. We don't listen to stupid virtue signallers.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become especially aware of the essential work done in underpaid, precarious jobs, and how the most vulnerable, particularly the elderly, are inadequately cared for.
We were already aware of all this. We can bring in immigrants to do the low paid work. What is worrying is that there is a bigger and bigger deficit of specialist Doctors. Indeed, on current trends many public health systems may collapse by the end of the decade.
Many on the Left urge that we deliver on our heightened sense of obligations to community as captured in the recent slogan (however disingenuous) that ‘we’re all in this together’.
But we need smart people. We have enough verbose virtue signalling cretins.
Moreover, the exceptional circumstances of the past three years have prompted valuable soul-searching about the constituents of wellbeing, how capitalist society should be reshaped so we no longer spend so many hours in cars and planes, so everyone can take walks in nature, spend more time with family, engage in acts of compassion and kindness.
Why pay a Professor to tell us what we already know? We need smart people to study difficult stuff at University.
We live in times in which the citizens of prosperous societies are, like never before, unequal in wealth, wellbeing and the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to their communities.
But we also live in times when Scientists and Technologists are making rapid progress in developing Green Energy and Quantum Computers and Nanotechnology and 3 D printers. We can't afford to let some of our students study worthless or woke shite. The alternative is to accept Chinese suzerainty and to lock up anyone who says Chairman Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.
Liberal egalitarianism has stepped up to shed light on these problems,
No. It has published coprophagous shite.
but we should look again at the socialist tradition,
China is Communist. It is now telling Vietnam to return to the strict path of Leninist orthodoxy.
to ‘go back and explore the other road’ as Murdoch enjoins us,
Taiwan may soon have to explore that other road. Do we really want to join them?
to remind us of the challenging implications of the ideal of equality.
If there is no scarcity, there will be no economic inequality though Elton John still won't sing at my birthday party. Sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment