Rescuing Justice and Equality
G. A. Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0674030761
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality.
In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawls’s theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making.
Cohen also charges Rawls’s constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality.
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what might be called comprehensive assessment of the proferred justification of P when we ask whether the projected behavior of the members of S is itself justified. And comprehensive justification of P obtains only if that behavior is indeed justified.15 “We should do A because they will do B” may justify our doing A, but it does not justify it comprehensively if they are not justified in doing B, 15. It follows, harmlessly, that penal policies adopted to reduce the incidence of crime lack
of policies that mention groups of people is presented in the usual way, with exclusively third-person reference to groups and their members, the pertinence of the question why various people are disposed to act as they do is not always apparent. It becomes evident when we picture the relevant people themselves rehearsing the argument, and sometimes more so when the audience is a strategically selected one. The test of interpersonal presentation makes vivid that the The Incentives Argument
incentives argument, the rich cannot justify making its factual premise true. There is consequently an impression of incoherence when they employ the argument in defense of low taxes on top salaries: for the more disposed they are to affirm its normative premise, the less disposed they should be to make its factual premise true.35 The argument stands up only because the agents mentioned in its minor premise do not act as one would expect people who put forward its major premise to act. If they
specifications that were introduced here, this Protestant society would not be just, despite the fact that it displays a just distribution. We might say of the society that it is accidentally, but not constitutively, just. But, whatever phrasings we may prefer, the important thing is to distinguish “society” and “distribution” as candidate subjects of the predicate “just.” (And it bears mentioning that, in contemporary practice, an ethos that achieves difference principle equality would almost
those rules. The second illustration of discrepancy between what coercive structure commands and what profoundly affects the distribution of benefits and burdens is my own point about incentives. Maximinizing legislation,51 and, hence, a coercive basic structure that is just as far as the difference principle is concerned, are consistent with a maximizing ethos across society that, under many conditions, will produce severe inequalities and a meager level of provision for the worst off, yet both