I haven’t been posting lately because I’ve been working on topics not directly related to the theme of the blog.

I am reading G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality. It is, like everything Jerry wrote, stimulating, original, and clever. The main claim in the book is that the Rawlsian argument for the difference principle is incoherent. Rawls argues that natural talents are morally arbitrary; therefore talented persons should use those undeserved gifts to benefit others.  Thus, Rawls allows inequalities provided that they benefit the worst-off. But it turns out, Cohen observes, that the talented rich (as he calls them) cannot themselves give this argument to the worst-off folks to justify their greater earnings, because the reason the rich would not work as hard at a greater tax rate is because they don’t want to. The rich, now taxed at 40%, tell the poor: “see, if you tax us at 60% we’ll work less and you’ll suffer.” When asked why they’ll work less at 60%, the answer is simply “because we’ll make less  money.” Cohen observes that the rich folks’ working less is not a natural fact, but something within their intention. But that means that the rich do not guide their behavior by justice but by self-interest, and this in turn contradicts the premise of the argument for the difference principle (this is a coarse summary; the argument is much more complex.) This is one of the reasons why Cohen thinks that you can consistently be a socialist egalitarian like him, or a laissez-faire guy like Nozick, but you cannot consistently be a Rawlsian liberal.

Rawlsians have answers to this, but I’m not interested in those right now.  What I want to point out is that there is complete agreement by both parties in this debate plus a third party, the luck-egalitarians, on the premise of the argument –that persons do not deserve their natural talents and therefore must put them at the service of others. Cohen agrees with Rawlsians on this; he just thinks that the premise supports much greater material equality than Rawls does. Similarly, luck-egalitarians agree with the premise; they just observe that distributions should be sensitive to people’s choices (in fact, the claim that distributions should not be sensitive to natural endowments is central to the luck-egalitarians.)

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that the premise is false. More: I suspect (but am not totally sure) it is a category mistake to say that I do not deserve to be the person who I am. (Of course, if by “I deserve X” we mean “I have earned X by a choice I made,” the premise is trivially true.)  I think that we morally own our talents because they came attached to our persons. Neither I nor my ancestors took those assets from anyone else. Owning and deserving are not coextensive concepts. There are many things that I morally own even if my coming to own them is not the result of a meritorious personal choice for which someone (the state?) is rewarding me. If I am correct in this, then it seems to me that we can, without remorse, ignore about 90% of contemporary political philosophy.