G.A Cohen wites
A person is exploited when unfair advantage is taken of him,
That is true enough. However, without unfairness, per se, an unanticipated or unjustified onerousness of obligation may be resented as exploitative even if it does not benefit the other party.
and he suffers from (bad) brute luck when his bad luck is not the result of a gamble or risk which he could have avoided.
This does not follow. If a person is befuddled by drink and ends up being taken advantage of, he may well resent having been exploited. More importantly, if a person who can beat or kill you or ruin your career harbours such a feeling, it is in your interest to compensate the person so thoroughly that he is appeased.
I believe that the primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence on distribution of both exploitation and brute luck.
Exploitation is like unconscionability and thus is justiciable or can be brought under the scope of a tribunal of some sort. Insurance schemes are the remedy for bad luck. The primary egalitarian impulse is to rant and rave. It isn't to do anything sensible.
To be sure, principled non- and antiegalitarians
are useless and stupid as Cohen
also condemn (what they consider to be) exploitation,
This causes Exploitation to cry and cry and run home to its Mummy.
but they do not have the same view of exploitation as egalitarians have, partly because they are less disturbed by brute-luck-derived asset differences which skew distributive outcomes.
Exploitation, as I have frequently explained, arises because Viceroy Sahib is surreptitiously entering the hovels of the poor and draining them of their precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. This is the true cause of poverty and inequality.
On the foregoing sketch of the primary egalitarian impulse,
which I have far more elegantly expressed
a statement which purports to express and assert it is exposed to two kinds of challenge. First, such a statement might be criticized for misidentifying what should, in the light of the fundamental egalitarian aim, be equalized.
Dignity? Abolish the distinction between Professor and Student. Given anybody who wants a PhD as many of them as they like.
I shall myself so criticize Dworkin's equality of resources proposal, since I think that (among other things) it penalizes people who have tastes for which they cannot be held responsible but which, unluckily for them, cost a lot to satisfy.
Which is why other people must be held responsible for supplying those tastes.
But one might also reject equality of resources on the quite different ground that it conflicts with some important nonegalitarian values.
Like not having your head kicked in by people you hold responsible for supplying your expensive tastes.
One might say, for example, that while it is indeed brute luck which distributes children into rich and poor families, it would be wrong to seek rectification of the results of that luck, since
you would get your head kicked in. On the other hand, you are welcome to chop off the legs of tall people so they attain height equality with the short.
that would undermine the institution of the family. In this article I shall not discuss problems for egalitarian proposals of that second kind, problems, that is, of trade-off between equality and other values. That is because I shall treat the various egalitarian proposals to be reviewed below as weak equalisandum claims. An equalisandum claim specifies that which ought to be equalized, what, that is, people should be rendered equal in.
This is the claim made by the vendor of a good or service. Everybody who paid for the thing, got the same thing. If a mistake was made, the vendor apologizes and makes reparations.
There may be vendors, or potential vendors willing to meet any given equalisandum demand. The question is how much will they charge or, in economic terms- the opportunity cost- i.e. the best alternative foregone.
Cohen, of course, isn't interested in equalising anything. That's the sort of thing the market, or a bureaucracy, can do well enough. He is only interested in making stupid demands. Still, he got paid a little money to do so. Why grudge him that?
An unqualified or strong equalisandum claim, which is the sort that an uncompromising egalitarian asserts, says that people should be as equal as possible in the dimension it specifies.
Thus, McDonalds will sell me the same 'Happy Meal' at the same price as it charges other customers. True, it make me happier than someone else but that is 'consumer surplus'. Marx considered 'profit' to be 'producer surplus'. By the Morishima fundamental theorem of Marxism, if even one enterprise makes a profit, exploitation exists. The Feminist version is that even if one man has a dick, then, because dicks may well enter vaginas, women are being exploited.
A qualified or weak equalisandum claim says that they should be as equal as possible in some dimension but subject to whatever limitations need to be imposed in deference to other values: those limitations are not specified by the claim in question.
This is mere puffery. McDonalds may say 'we hope all our customers will experience as much joy as possible while eating their Happy Meal. Sadly, we understand that some of our customers may be dealing with bereavement or other tragic outcomes and thus we cannot guarantee that all customers will experience an equal degree of joy from their Happy Meal. However, we assure you that everybody- rich or poor- will receive exactly the same item. Enjoy!'
Now, strong equalisandum claims face objections of the two kinds distinguished above, and which I shall now call egalitarian and nonegalitarian objections.
I suppose, some people say they got fewer fries than others in their Happy Meal. That is an egalitarian objection or claim to reparation. The nonegalitarian objection would be that a beejay should be provided to me by a Super-Model while I eat my Happy Meal because I've got a really tiny dick and so the Universe owes me big time.
An egalitarian objection rests on a view about the right way to treat people equally which differs from the one embodied in the strong equalisandum claim it challenges.
For example, I might demand McDonalds make a Happy Meal for people who want Indian, not American style, fast food. If there are enough Indians in the area, perhaps they will consider doing so. However, it is likely that some other vendor would have already cornered that market. My point is, the market takes care of this objection by itself.
What matters is if there is an incentive to supply whatever is being demanded. If demand is effective- i.e. backed up by money- it will be provided though the quality may be low or non-existent. The fact is you can easily buy a 'Philosopher's Stone' or 'flying unicorn' quite cheaply. Sadly, they are more than a bit shit. But this is also true of places which market themselves as egalitarian utopias.
The egalitarian objector thinks that people should be equal, to some or other extent, in something other than what the claim he opposes specifies, but he does not, qua egalitarian objector, object to the strength of that claim as such.
e.g. McDonalds should supply Samosas as well as Burgers because of the large Indian population in this region.
By contrast, a nonegalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim says that, while the claim might (and might not) correctly identify what should be equalized, it wrongly fails to defer to nonegalitarian values which restrict the extent to which the form of equality it proposes should be pursued: because of those values, so the objection says, the equalisandum proposal is unacceptable (at least) in its strong form.
Gibberish. Strong egalitarianism is everybody getting the same Happy Meal. There is another dimension- e.g. the issue of whether the Indian Samosa is equal to the Burger- which is being invoked by weak as piss palaver. Thus a guy who complains that McDonalds is inegalitarian because it privileges the food of the White Man over the cuisine of the benighted darkie whose ancestors were raped, sodomized and subjected to incessant fellatio and cunnilingus by aristocratic Viceroys.
An egalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim also applies to the weak one correlative to it, whereas a nonegalitarian objection challenges strong proposals only.
Egalitarianism is welcome to have as many dimensions as it pleases. A strong equilisandum objection would point to material evidence that such and such person got less of such and such good or service than other people. A weak one would just waffle on about how there is some other dimension which is being neglected- e.g. why is McDonald's not chopping off the penises of all customers? Don't they understand that no meal can be 'happy' if there is even one penis prowling around which might end up in a vagina?
Since mine will be a weak proposal,
because Cohen has shit for brains and isn't really interested in equality at all.
objections of a nonegalitarian kind will not detain me. Taking welfare as a sample equalisandum proposal,
If it is 'strong' then there is a multidimensional configuration space in which it has a representation. This means that any deviation from the prescribed outcome vector for a particular individual, then there is a valid claim of inequality.
I shall presently illustrate
your own idiocy
the distinction I have tried to draw by describing supposed objections to the welfare equalisandum which are (a) plainly not egalitarian, (b) arguably, and so I believe, egalitarian, and (c) problematic with respect to how they should be classified. But, before embarking on that exercise in differentiation, a word about what I shall mean by 'welfare' here, and throughout this study. Of the many readings of 'welfare' alive (if not well) in economics and philosophy, I am interested in two: welfare as enjoyment, or, more broadly, as a desirable or agreeable state of consciousness,
which is a matter of psychology, not economics. It may be not just multiply but infinitely realizable. There may be a 'moksha' pill or technique. But whereas a commodity space has a mathematical representation as a multi-dimensional space, 'Enjoyment' or 'agreeable states of consciousness' do not.
What I mean is this. If I define 'Happy Meal' as a burger of a certain size plus x number of French Fries, then claims about getting an unequal portion can be usefully made. Otherwise, all we have is worthless jibber jabber about the true meaning of Happiness and how anybody can be called happy so long as even one penis is prowling around.
which I shall call hedonic welfare; and welfare as preference satisfaction, where preferences order states of the world, and where a person's preference is satisfied if a state of the world that he prefers obtains, whether or not he knows that it does
which is why we can argue that the bloke is not happy with his happy meal because his own penis has not been cut off. What if it crams itself up his own arsehole? I tell you penises cause RAPE! They must be banned immediately!
and, a fortiori, whatever hedonic welfare he does or does not get as a result of its obtaining.
Very true. You may think you aren't getting hedonic welfare from your dick being cut off but, a fortiori, you don't at all. No one can be truly happy till not even a single solitary dick can prowl around imperilling vaginas.
Egalitarianism may or may not be desirable. However, market or bureaucratic or other protocol bound allocation systems have no difficulty with a strong equalisandum because they benefit by seeking to equalize outcomes- e.g. ensuring the Happy Meal each customer receives is the same.
Cohen doesn't get this.
a) Many people think that a policy of equalizing welfare is inconsistent with the maintenance of family values, because, so they say, those values endorse practices of benefiting loved ones which generate welfare inequalities.
But you can still equalize outcomes in the commodity space. Some aspects of welfare- e.g. having a nice Mummy or being pretty- aren't commodities. Yet. Further scientific progress and higher economic productivity may increasingly make them so.
Now, however penetrating that point may be, it does not represent an egalitarian objection to equality of welfare.
It could do. Maybe there is trade off between increasing equality in the commodity space today but decreasing it in the wider 'welfare' space later on. If we let the Elon Musks of the world control more resources, maybe they will make amazing discoveries such that non-commodity aspects of welfare become more equal. In affluent countries, maybe this is what the vast majority want. They seem to have lost the taste for redistribution by the end of the Sixties.
One caveat which Cohen & Co ignore is that 'disutility'- which cashes out as opportunity cost- is a sort of 'negative' Welfare. Once that is factored in, egalitarianism is just a Utilitarianism where market-makers enable Hicks-Kaldor improvements- i.e. the world wags on as before.
Unregulated kinship generosity may be precious on other grounds, but it could not be thought to promote the result that people get an equal amount of something that they should have equal amounts of.
Very true. We should have equal amounts of health and beauty and wit and intelligence. It's unfair that my sister has more of these things that I do. That's why I hate my parents.
Accordingly, if the family values objection indeed has force against equality of welfare, it is a reason for restricting the writ of that particular equalisandum, or form of equality, and not a reason for proposing another equalisandum in its stead.
Also if any one objects to my shitting on them, then we should restrict the writ of the 'equalisandum' whereby people who haven't shat on me feel it is unfair for me to shit on them.
Family values do not challenge equality of welfare when the latter is construed as a qualified equalisandum proposal.
Only in the sense that you are wrong to object to my shitting on you.
Another objection to unqualified equality of welfare
there is only one. Welfare can't be objectively measured
which is not egalitarian is that implementing it would involve intolerably intrusive state surveillance.
surveillance is useless in such cases
("Hi! I'm from the Ministry of Equality. Are you, by any chance, unusually happy today?")
Say you are miserable. They may give you some money.
Gathering the information needed to apply unqualified equality of resources
is impossible. It is only with hindsight that we discover what was or wasn't a resource.
might well involve less intrusion, and that would be a reason for preferring unqualified equality of resources to unqualified equality of welfare, but not one which impugned the egalitarian character of equality of welfare.
What impugns Cohen's shite is the fact that it involves things which can't be measured and thus partial ordering is impossible.
