nozick
There has been a flurry of arguments about inequality ever since Bernanke made his remarks on the subject, a few weeks ago. After wading through these arguments - which Mankiw (correctly) sums up as all coming back to Rawls versus Nozick, one concludes that this argument could go on forever because there is little or no basis for rational agreement. But there is a new, more promising way of framing the issue that comes out of left-libertarianism.
Although Rawls in A Theory of Justice developed a complex and elegant argument to show that if self-interested, rational people were engaged in a bargaining game to establish a society they would agree on limiting inequalities to those that benefit the least advantaged group, there are a number of reasons why this argument is not convincing. For one thing, we are not in the position of establishing a society so it is not very relevant (we might very well be willing to accept such a society if we were born into it but that is not the same as being willing to change from our current system to that one). Also Nozick’s counter-argument in Anarchy, State, and Utopia is, I believe, devastating: that such a “patterned” system would require redistribution after virtually every transaction (because it would likely undo the previously acceptable distribution) and would be unjust because it would conflict with any kind of property right or “entitlement.”
Where does this leave us? The predominant view is that this is just one of many examples of our inability to find common ground for values and we simply have no choice but to accept this state of affairs. Others, such as Alasdair MacIntyre (see After Virtue) argue that this is the result of the failure of the “enlightenment project” which, in destroying the traditional religious and Aristotelian context for morality and failing to establish a new one, left modernity with fragments of what was once morality without providing a common ground for values. As a result, our debates about values ultimately rest on personal feelings or opinion and take the form of “my goal is better than your goal.”
Continue reading ‘Inequality: Beyond Rawls vs. Nozick’
