The Domestic Context: Why Do Distributive Shares Matter?

Several of my critics are dissatisfied with what I assert about distributive justice within the state. I must confess, I find this somewhat surprising; I have rarely encountered skepticism on this front, but my critics in the present roundtable have developed powerful arguments against my two arguments in favor of the relevance of distributive shares in the domestic arena. I think there are three versions of these criticisms. The first, given by Gilabert and Miller, argues that we must move beyond autonomy, to some notion of wellbeing (Gilabert) or “impartial concern . . . for [the exercise of] important human activities” (Miller) if we are to adequately ground distributive duties. The second, given primarily by Caney, notes that my argument in favor of a roughly Rawlsian defense of distributive justice domestically ignores other plausible accounts of political justification. The third, found in different versions in Miller and in Stilz, argues that there is no link between moral egalitarianism and equality of political influence.

We might begin with the first argument. Gilabert's version of it is admirably clear, so I will engage primarily with that one. He notes that a theory grounded on autonomy and planning cannot plausibly invoke a notion of relative distributive shares, except by surreptitiously supplementing that notion of autonomy with a theory of wellbeing. After all, if we care about autonomy, why do we care about relative holdings of wealth and income? To care about the latter, we have to acknowledge that what we really care about are the “conditions for wellbeing . . . for which maximal sets of economic opportunities, income, and wealth are proxies” (p. 273).

In response, I think I might insist that primary goods—as Rawls understands them, and as I use them—are not, in fact, proxies for anything else. We focus on the social primary goods not as an indirect way of getting at wellbeing, but because these are the goods that are created through our social processes of cooperation, and to which entitlements are enforced by means of legal coercion. This is, I think, what differentiates my own view from Gilabert's analysis of wellbeing, as well as Miller's social democracy. I believe that our best reason to care about material inequality is because we are seeking to justify the sorts of coercive power the state has over those individuals within its jurisdiction. This sort of story, though, does not have to invoke wellbeing, or anything else, to justify its concern with primary goods. Instead, we are trying to figure out what sort of justification can be given to all those coerced—including the worst-off—to justify the rightness of the coercive structures that govern their lives. I understand Rawls as providing this sort of story; the “maximin principle” is morally significant precisely because it enables us to explain to even the worst-off within a society why they ought to welcome and accept the coercive regime within which they are situated. Gilabert is quite within his rights, of course, to reject the entirety of this sort of theoretical edifice; but I do not think it is right to think that it involves a surreptitious appeal to wellbeing. For my part, I think a concern with wellbeing has to be translated into other terms—terms that involve morally foundational aspects of the person, such as autonomy—before it can be regarded as morally significant. My wellbeing might be significantly increased were I to be taller or more attractive than I am; I do not conclude, though, that anyone has any duties to help me gain height or beauty. What matters, instead, is that my status as an autonomous agent is respected, and that the state within which I live offers me the sorts of political guarantees that constitute this sort of respect.

Caney's version of the argument, in contrast, notes the plurality of different forms of justification that might be adduced within that society. There are, at the very least, forms of justification—he cites Rawls's Political Liberalism as offering one of them—that do not make essential reference to relative material shares in the process of justification. Why, then, should we think that the two reasons I provide—the arguments from democratic self-government, on the one hand, and the argument from the justification of private-law coercion, on the other—are the only ones available to us?

There are at least two responses that might be made to this version of the argument, neither of which I suspect will be taken as sufficient by Caney himself. The first is to note that I disagree with Caney's reading of Political Liberalism. Caney presents Rawls's account of public reason as a competitor to the theory offered in A Theory of Justice, so that we must choose between the accounts of justification offered in the first and second books. I think this is wrong. Political Liberalism is, on my reading, a particular way of solving a problem within the schema of justice as fairness, namely, the problem of how a just democratic state might preserve its justice over time. This means, though, that endorsing Political Liberalism does not actually entail the jettisoning of A Theory of Justice, nor the abandonment of that latter book's concern with distributive justice. The arguments given by A Theory of Justice might be understood in a distinctly political way, after Political Liberalism; it does not mean that these arguments have ceased to hold.

This leads to the second of the responses I might offer to Caney's argument, namely, the fact that, on my view, all the competing accounts he offers share a common problem: they mistake what it means to treat people with equal concern and respect. Rawls's original position, after all, is designed precisely to ensure that we do not bias the determination of political principles in our own favor; the two principles that emerge are supposed to differ from utilitarian principles precisely in that they respect the separateness of persons, and offer individuals who are disadvantaged something like a veto right over acceptable forms of inequality. Simply put, I think Rawls's arguments here are better than the competing accounts that Caney describes, and better precisely because of what he tries to do that the utilitarian (among many others) does not. I am aware, though, of the limitations of this response; someone who rejects the entirety of the Rawlsian project will, naturally, reject my own uses of that project as well. All I can say in my own defense is that I find something uniquely right in the Rawlsian analysis, and that those who disagree with that analysis have some obligation to explain why they are not violating the separateness of persons, in the manner decried by Rawls.

The final version of the argument, though, is the most powerful and difficult, and is expressed in different forms by Miller and Stilz. Why, after all, do I think that equal moral treatment entails anything like equality of influence upon the government? Many respectable political philosophers—Mill among them—did not think that this sort of equality was required. Miller goes further than this: equality of political influence could not be achieved through anything like distributive justice, since distributive justice is but one factor among many in determining who has political voice, and it is possible to restrict the impact of money on politics, as has been done within Europe (p. 291). In the face of all this, why think that equality of political influence is a good basis for a concern with distributive justice?

We can start with the latter set of concerns. Miller is, to my thinking, wildly overoptimistic about the extent to which we can harmonize significant inequality with democratic self-rule. The empirical literature indicates that increased economic inequality within a society tends to entrench an unwillingness on the part of the government to act on behalf of the relatively impoverished; those who are less possessed of wealth, predictably, become less possessed of voice as well.Footnote ² This process may be difficult, if not impossible, for even the most well-intentioned polities to avoid, given the extent to which the success of those polities depends upon the interests of businesses and those who own them.Footnote ³ What is wrong about this? Contrary to Miller's construction of the problem, it is not just that everyone affected by an institution ought to have the equal right to influence that institution; I do not think that principle holds. (I might be made terribly depressed if you marry someone I dislike but that does not mean I ought to have any share in the marital decision-making process.) Rather, the difficulty is in understanding how a coercive regime of state governance might be made rightful. On my view, what is wrong with legal power in the absence of voice is not just that it is likely to lead to bad things, which it is, but that the absence of voice makes the coercion itself a bad thing. This, naturally, is also my response to Mill. Mill justified plural votes for the educated as more likely to lead to good outcomes, and not unduly demeaning to the uneducated whose votes are outweighed. My response, which I hope is not idiosyncratic, is to think that Mill is, even if correct on the first supposition, utterly wrong on the latter. I am right to think myself coerced wrongly when that coercion is not done in a manner that regards my autonomous will as equally important in the decision-making process. The democratic argument for distributive equality, in sum, misunderstands neither the relationship between inequality and democracy nor the nature of democracy itself. The burden, I think, is on those who would tamper with the egalitarian ideal to justify the thought that democratic right could persist in a society with radically unequal voice.Footnote ⁴

The International Context: Why Do Distributive Shares Not Matter?

My argument in Justice and Foreign Policy was intended to reframe the debate about global distributive justice. Part of that reframing involves getting rid of what I take to be wrong arguments about the relevance of relative distributive holdings between individuals who do not share citizenship in a territorial state. I would note, though, that all of this negative work is intended to lay the groundwork for a positive view, on which democratic self-government sets up rules against which the foreign policy of a liberal government might be judged. Some of these rules involve setting a framework against which much of our current global economic regime might be judged as wrongful—including the thought that much of our current economic practice involves the coercive imposition of treaties that undermine the democratic freedom of more marginal and impoverished societies.

I emphasize this, in the present context, to clarify that I am not quite as hostile to global claims of justice as some of my critics appear to believe. Nonetheless, they have rightly noted that I am hostile to the idea that we have the same reason to value distributive equality at the global level and at the domestic level; indeed, a variety of criticisms have been raised against this perspective. Miller, for instance, argues that my willingness to allow material inequality between states “depends on neglect of the central consideration in Rawls's theory of justice, namely, fairness” (p. 296) and that Rawls's theory ought to apply to all cases of joint commitment to a cooperative venture. Gilabert, in contrast, argues that my stated concern for exploitation requires me to move beyond my autonomy-based analysis of global justice, toward a theory that demands equality of wellbeing at the global level (p. 276).

Neither of these criticisms, I think, is entirely persuasive. To my reading, Gilabert's suggestion seems wrong; what is striking about exploitation is that it is different from simple inequality, and a theory that condemns global inequality is therefore likely to hide exploitation's wrongness from view. Thus, on my view, a state that is vulnerable to the policy decisions of another state has a right in justice to be free from that latter state's exploitation of that vulnerability; the imposition of exploitative terms of trade might be understood here as a violation of collective autonomy. The exploited state is able to charge that there is a particular wrong here—the use of vulnerability to undermine democratic self-rule—that makes the wealthy state's actions unjust. On Gilabert's global egalitarianism, though, none of this story is brought to the fore, because all inequality is presumptively unjust. I think this is a reason to believe that a view that begins with the autonomy of persons, both as individuals and through their political institutions, is better able to help us understand justice in the global realm.

Miller's analysis, similarly, seems to decouple Rawls's concerns from the context in which they were developed, and turn them instead into a free-floating moral theory, to be deployed whenever there is cooperation and production. Some may find this an attractive reading of Rawls; I do not—and Rawls himself explicitly rejected it, both in Political Liberalism and in The Law of Peoples. Rawls's distributive conclusions cannot be wrenched from his analysis of political society—not, at any rate, without undermining what it is that makes his theory appealing.

Miller's argument, though, is more far-reaching than this, and posits a global social-democratic vision that goes further than Rawls in the demands it can place upon us. Miller defends this vision, in part, by arguing that my sufficientarian vision—on which people have the right to be free from circumstances undermining their autonomous agency—is radically inadequate and would condemn millions to deeply subpar forms of human experience. It would condemn those who are above subsistence, but in severe poverty, to lives of “ill-health, drudgery, disruption, and discomfort” (p. 295).

There are several different ways to read this possibility, though, and not all of them are hostile to my own view. One way—Miller's way—is to suggest that there are a great many people who are living autonomous lives, but who will be condemned to misery and horror by my standard of sufficiency. My own way, though, is to suggest that perhaps the minimal standard I have identified is not all that minimal after all. I do, for instance, argue quite explicitly that merely having the ability to make plans is not enough to make a person autonomous; the prisoner can decide whether to roll over, or not, and when to do so—and none of that entails autonomous functioning. Rather, autonomy might be a rather demanding ideal, involving individual, social, and political aspects, all of which must come together to create the circumstances under which individuals are able to build lives of value for themselves. It is possible to read Miller, on this account, not as a critic of my view, but as someone who has miscast me as a minimalist about the rights of the global poor.

Miller might, in response, note that I have identified the United Nations poverty line as a provisional baseline, so that people below that baseline might be presumed to be living lives that are not adequately respectful of autonomy. Does this not entail minimalism? I do not think so. I present this line only as a starting point for further discussion, and emphatically reject the idea that anyone above that line is adequately protected. (It would be very difficult, I believe, to firmly establish any particular line as the point at which autonomous functioning is presented.) I would further emphasize that if what we care about is that individuals lead lives that they have reason to value, then we have reason to care as much about democratization as we do about global redistribution. The most powerful guarantor of flourishing lives, it seems to me, is the existence of a state that takes itself to be bound to protect those lives and that is, in actual fact, under the collective control of those lives.Footnote ⁵ Those of us who care about global economic development have reason to value democratic self-government not only for its own sake but because of what it can provide for the poor.

I want to respond to one final point before moving on to a discussion of democracy, and that is Caney's argument, according to which I have not actually established that we have no reason to care about distributive equality in the global realm. For him, I have at most established one reason to care about distributive equality in the local realm, a reason that does not scale to the global. He is, of course, quite right. The difficulty, though, is in knowing what to conclude from this. On my view, demanding equalization in any particular currency is inherently a strange thing to ask for; while the appeal of moral egalitarianism is obvious, the appeal of equality of stuff (for example) is considerably more mysterious.Footnote ⁶ For me, this means that when we have established a particularly good explanation for why we should care about distributive equality in a particular context, and that explanation holds only in that particular context, then we have some provisional reason to think that the norm itself does not hold outside that context. Caney disagrees at the practical level; on his view, we have multiple reasons to value particular visions of egalitarianism, and the burden falls on those of us who are opposed. Against this sort of argument, though, I think the best response is simply to admit that Caney's structural diagnosis is right: I have at most described a reason to value distributive justice within the state—not a dispositive reason to disvalue it elsewhere.

Justice and Empire: Why May Democracies Work for Democratization?

The final third of my book is devoted to the defense of two propositions: first, that we have considerably stronger prudential reasons to avoid intervening coercively in favor of democracy than we often realize; and second, that the reasons we have for granting principled tolerance to alternative visions of political life apply only to competing visions of democracy. This, of course, has the implication that societies that cannot plausibly claim to be democratic are to be treated with only prudential forms of respect. Democratic societies should avoid widespread and coercive intervention in such countries, but only because such intervention is unlikely to get that society closer to democracy—not because these nondemocratic systems are worthy, in themselves, of respect.

This vision of foreign policy, understandably, has some difficulties associated with it. One of the most important, of course, is that it looks entirely too much like a justification for imperialism—an imperialism of democracy, to be sure, but an imperialism nonetheless. The moral difficulty of this imperialism might be mitigated by a recognition that the book endorses a toleration about what counts as democratic government; we can be confident in the ideal of democratic self-rule, while still respectful and tolerant toward (what we take to be) deeply mistaken visions of democracy. This, though, is not enough to make the difficulty here go away; and Miller and Stilz each present a version of the difficulty.

Miller's version of the argument, which focuses on the case of China, is more thoroughgoing—and more blunt—than that of Stilz. Miller imagines a possible defense of the Chinese Communist Party, which begins with the fact that the Party is supported by “many informed, intelligent, humane people in China,” indeed by the “majority of Chinese” (p. 298); and the argument proceeds by supposing that the Party might be understood as a uniquely rightful and justified response to the history and geography of China. On this analysis, the Party's rule is justified with reference to the ways in which it has helped China emerge from poverty. Miller emphasizes that it has lifted a half-billion Chinese people from grinding deprivation; and on this putative justification, the occasional repressive actions of the Party might be justified as “necessary evils or individually unnecessary evils of a sort that are bound to occur” (p. 298). Miller then concludes that I have not offered sufficient reason to regard the Communist Party's rule as unworthy of our principled respect.

Miller is not necessarily defending this argument; he presents it, instead, as the sort of actually existing political justification with which a book like mine ought to engage. This sort of justification has been presented during the course of China's history by those keen to demonstrate that the Party's rule is rightful, despite its lack of democratic engagement. Miller is correct about one thing: it is certainly possible in principle that there might be forms of rightful rule that do not involve plural parties. He asserts that I disagree with this, citing my discussion of a hypothetical Stalinist party, which nominally listens to the people but in fact is immunized from public pressure. This, however, is a misreading. If I say that a Stalinist single-party system is a bad thing, I do not thereby commit myself to the proposition that all single-party systems are Stalinist. The rest of the argument, though, is hard to make out. What are we to make of the idea that the fact that a government is supported by the majority of the governed somehow lends it some measure of moral right? I take it that the majority of North Korean citizens actually do support Kim Jong-un; the outpouring of grief after the death of Kim Jong-il appeared to be, in part, sincere grief over a beloved leader's death.Footnote ⁷ To take any lesson from that about North Korea's regime seems somewhat perverse; of course totalitarian regimes are often able to generate their own support; that is what totalitarian control of the media tends to get you. Miller would not necessarily regard North Korean rule as rightful; majority acceptance is not presented as sufficient for justification on the analysis he presents. But it is not clear to me why support for totalitarian rule provides even partial justification for that rule.

Economic development, similarly, seems an unpromising basis on which to ground rightful rule. Effective development policy is a profoundly valuable human achievement, and I agree with Miller that the Communist Party deserves credit for Chinese economic success. On my view, though, justified rule requires more than the reduction of poverty. What justifies political coercion is—and must be—more than this. It must involve some sincere and plausible attempt to treat those ruled as moral equals, both to the rulers and to one another. It must offer more than merely paper guarantees of rights. Miller's argument that China's systematic oppression of human rights is merely a necessary evil suggests that we could regard development out of poverty as so central that some inevitable forms of evil might be excusable. This is being written after Tiananmen Square; after the Great Firewall of China; after the revelation that several thousand political and religious prisoners have been executed for the purposes of international organ sales.Footnote ⁸ Miller and I agree that coercively intervening to make China's political society more democratic would be wrong, because that sort of intervention would in fact be futile, bloody, and counterproductive. Why, in addition to that, must we refrain from saying that China is morally wrong in how it exercises political authority? I believe that if we could actually promote democratic governance in China, we should do so, both because the Chinese people deserve to be treated as moral equals by their government, and because democratic rule might make such atrocities less likely in the future. Miller thinks the proposed Chinese argument against these conclusions must be taken seriously, and that the absence of a rejoinder to that argument is a defect in my book. I do not think it is. The imagined Chinese argument is not a good one, and no matter how many people make it, it is worthy of rejection.

Stilz's version of the argument is more subtle. It begins with the moral importance of actual—not hypothetical—consent to government institutions. Individual moral agents have an interest in being understood not only as users of state instruments (Stilz's “taker” perspective) but also as agents responsible for creating and supporting those institutions (the “maker” perspective). On this analysis, there is something missing from views that, like mine, allow in principle for the possibility that democracy might be imposed, from the outside, upon a previously undemocratic society. What is missing, of course, is the importance for those individuals of the particular institutions they have built for themselves. On Stilz's account, we have reason to think that democratic intervention is blocked by more than mere prudence; institutions that do not count as democratic, but which offer at least “sufficient respect” to the perspectives and rights of all citizens, are entitled to principled respect as well—if those institutions are, in fact, supported by the populace over whom they purport to rule.

This is a powerful argument; I am not sure, though, that when unpacked it is entirely unlike my own. There are, to start with, at least two different ways in which actual consent might matter for the practice of intervention in favor of democracy: the prudential, as I have called it, and the principled. Stilz and I are in agreement that, where actual people will resent and resist external agitation in favor of democracy—which is to say in very nearly all actual cases—then we have a solid moral reason to avoid such agitation. This means, though, that if Stilz and I disagree, it must be at the level of principle. So we might try to isolate these prudential worries, and for the moment stipulate that they are irrelevant. Why, if we could make it work, should we avoid attempting to make an undemocratic society more democratic?

To fix our intuitions, let us imagine the best possible case for democratic intervention. The society right now is organized around a nonegalitarian principle of state power; it gives full rights to members of a favored ethnic group, and regards the members of others as entitled to something slightly less robust. These disfavored members are thought of, perhaps, through the historically prevalent idea of “permanent children”; they are to be listened to, given some freedom, certainly, but not quite the same rights or roles as those given to favored members. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of that society have “sufficient respect” for their interests and rights, and—crucially—most of the actual members, whether favored or not, support that state and its system of governance. Imagine, further, that we could do what Stilz and I agree is generally impossible, and effectively reorganize that society from the outside, so that an egalitarian form of democratic self-government is installed. What reason might we have, then, to refrain from that intervention?

There are several possible reasons, of course, but I think none of them are all that persuasive. We might emphasize, with Stilz, the idea that we have an interest in being makers, as well as takers, of our institutions; but I would respond that for most of us the question is only whether or not we will actually comply with state institutions, not what shape those institutions would ideally take. I, like all of us who live in the United States, am a “taker” of a constitutional structure laid down before my birth; I support this Constitution, but apart from that support I cannot regard myself as “making” much of anything. If this sort of “making” is enough, though, then why is a similar sort of “making” not enough in our imagined case of intervention? If, as we have imagined, the populace subject to intervention will willingly (if perhaps grudgingly) support the democratic institutions forced upon them by an outside agency, why is that not enough to constitute “making” that constitution? For these agents—as for myself, and everyone who has not had a hand in constitutional negotiations—the fundamental rules of association are imposed by an outside agency, whether that agency is in the past or in another country. The fact that the constitutional structure is imposed on a population, then, seems largely beside the point.

Stilz might instead argue that it is disrespectful to undermine what people have actually built together, in favor of some hypothetical alternative. This argument, though, also comes in at least two versions. On one of these, this is a counsel of prudence, a reminder that wealthy and powerful societies have often dressed up naked self-interest in moral clothes, and that they rarely have any real understanding of the alternative forms of political society they propose to alter. This version of the argument is one I accept. For Stilz to go further than this, though, she must say that it is intrinsically disrespectful to intervene in favor of democracy, even when it would actually work; and I am not sure how we are to conclude that this project is itself disrespectful. Recall, after all, that an intervention into a political society is an alteration in how some particular individuals are using coercive force against other particular individuals. If such coercive force is being used without right, then it seems plausible to think that respect for persons requires, rather than precludes, such intervention; it is, to use the Kantian language, hindering a hindrance to freedom, and should be recognized as such. We might, indeed, think of our hypothetical intervention as the project of insisting that equal respect be made the principled basis on which coercive power is itself exercised. Why should that task, itself, be regarded as disrespectful?

Stilz might reply, finally, that we ought to regard actual consent itself as a sort of morally significant thing—not as a proxy for the various prudential worries we have discussed, but as something of value in its own right. My worry here, though, is similar to my worry with Miller above: Are there no constraints on the circumstances under which consent is morally salient? Stilz, unlike Miller, answers clearly in the affirmative: States must be the subject of “free cooperation” in which the autonomy claims of all are given at least some hearing. Why, though, should we think that this is enough? Stilz and I agree that the North Korean acceptance of the Kim family is not morally salient; the circumstances under which that consent might bind us are absent. Stilz, though, thinks that we can reasonably consent to being given something like second-class status within a society, and that this consent is to be taken as a thing of moral gravity. I cannot agree. On my view, it abuses the moral notion of autonomy to think that we can freely consent to a political society in which we are marked out as lesser. The same difficulties we found with North Korea persist even in these less extreme cases. What is required, instead, is the sort of justification that offers the possibility of reason-giving to the individual, understood as an equally valid source of moral and political claims; and this sort of justification, as I understand it, is at the heart of the democratic project.

One immediate rejoinder, of course, is that I might be overestimating Stilz's willingness to offer principled respect to inequality; the idea of second-class citizenship or the disfavored as “permanent children” might be so abhorrent that it could immediately negate any state's claim to moral significance. This solution, though, seems to entail that Stilz and I are not as dissimilar as it might have at first seemed. We are both willing to insist upon the moral equality of persons as a uniquely appropriate basis for government, and we are both concerned to make this idea harmonious with a diversity of particular ways of making that general idea concrete. Stilz and I would, on this account, be using different words to achieve the same result; she would limit the scope of the “sufficiently respectful” societies to only those that might be understood as different versions of liberal democracy. I believe Stilz wants more than this, though, and that entails that she wants to insist that second-class citizenship is worthy of our principled respect—so long as those who are marginalized accept (or, perhaps, do not actively reject) their marginalization. This idea, though, is one I will continue to resist. We have reason to speak out against this sort of injustice, regardless of how entrenched or inevitable it might seem.

I am extremely grateful to all my critics, both for the care and vigor of their criticisms and for their willingness to speak out against injustice, both at home and abroad. I hope that my own work is defensible; I am more confident, though, that exchanges such as our present one are a hopeful sign for the future. Sustained debate on the ethical dimensions of foreign policy is no longer a rarity. I thank Caney, Gilabert, Miller, and Stilz for their arguments, and look forward to the debates to come.