读书摘抄 - Responsibility and Distributive Justice

Introduction

This collection both reflects the recent interest in the relationship between responsibility and equality, and contributes further to our understanding of the relationship.

1. A brief history of the recent debate

A Theory of Justice: two principles of justice

First, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others; and second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

Rawls's final statement of the second principle requires social and economic inequalities to be (a) 'to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged' and (b) 'attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity'.

Three interpretations of equality of opportunity.

While Rawls appeals to the choices-circumstances distinction, his difference principle violates it in two important ways.

First, implementing the difference principle would likely obliterate at least some inequalities arising out of differential option luck. This is because the difference principle is concerned with improving the position of the worst-off members of society, as measured by primary social goods, and people with bad option luck can fall into this same category.

Second, Rawls fails to deliver endowment-insensitivity since his use of primary social goods as the metric of equality makes some brute luck inequalities invisible (most notably, those in health).

Samuel Scheffler reads Rawls as denying any fundamental distinction between choices and circumstances, and so sees no contradiction in his position.

Scheffler draws attention to Rawls's assessment of the principle as having appeal 'only as a prima facie principle, one that is to be weighed in the balance with others'. Rawls's overall goal is to establish which conception of justice is the most reasonable for the purpose of regulating the basic structure of a heterogeneous democratic society. Moral arbitrariness matters in so far as it helps to clarify the distributive implications of taking equal citizenship seriously', but it is equal citizenship rather than the absence of brute luck inequality that Rawls sees as fundamental.

Variations in option luck are then a legitimate basis for departures from an initial equality of resources. Brute luck is a different matter. Dworkin acknowledges that the availability of insurance can transform what would otherwise be brute luck into option luck, but also that insurance against some types of brute luck is not and cannot be available in the real world. He therefore argues that elaborate hypothetical insurance markets are required to set the right level of compensation for natural disabilities and talent deficits, the most prevalent forms of uninsurable brute bad luck in the real world that cannot be eliminated through social reforms, as class could be. The compensation is paid for through taxation of those without natural disabilities and talent deficiencies. (What does this mean? Does it mean that there are always some bad brute luck cannot be converted into option luck in the real world? And if all the bad brute luck can be converted into bad option luck, then how does the compensation come true?

How to compensate bad brute luck? Who would pay for that compensation? The people who have good brute luck?

Although Dworkin deals with natural disabilities and talent very well through his insurance market, there are other forms of brute luck that people suffer from, like meteorite.)

Dworkin appeals to the distinction between 'the person', which defines what success in life would be like, and 'circumstances', which facilitate or impede that success. Compensation can be claimed for disadvantageous circumstances, but compensation cannot be claimed for that which is part of the person, as this sets the terms for a successful life rather than merely impede or facilitate such success.

2. Responsibility and distributive justice

2.1 The concept of responsibility

Three concepts of responsibility: causal responsibility (A is causally responsible for X when A has caused X), moral responsibility (A is morally responsible for X when she is blameworthy or praiseworthy for X), and responsibility as obligation (A is responsible for X in the sense that A has some obligations with regard to X), including legal obligation.

Following a distinction commonly made in discussions of responsibility in moral philosophy, we want to suggest that there are two distinct concepts of responsibility that are most relevant to distributive justice: agent responsibility and consequential responsibility.

Agent responsibility: to be responsible for something can mean that one has brought this something about. It might be helpful to locate the concept of agent responsibility with regard to the concepts of causal and moral responsibility. To attribute agent responsibility for X we need to find both a causal link between the person and X as well as establish that X stems appropriately from that person's agency. On the other hand, attributions of agent responsibility do not require us to appeal to moral responsibility: we can say that a person is agent responsible for tying his shoelaces, or agent responsible for giving money to a bank robber at gunpoint, without the need to see such actions as blameworthy or praiseworthy.

Consequential responsibility: to say that a person is consequentially responsible for X is to say that the burdens and benefits that come with or constitute X are justly his or hers to bear (or to enjoy). Moral or legal responsibility can hence be understood as versions of consequential responsibility with the relevant burdens and benefits being, respectively, blame/praise and legal sanctions/opportunities.

If we put both agent and consequential responsibility together we can phrase the problem at the core of current debates about distributive justice as follows: Under what conditions, if any, could being agent responsible for finding oneself in a situation in which one suffers a disadvantage (or enjoys an advantage) make one consequentially responsible for the (dis)advantage as far as distributive justice is concerned?

2.2 Responsibility and other concepts

With regard to the relationship between luck and responsibility, one major conceptual question is whether people can be agent responsibility for what is a matter of luck for them or whether identifying something as a matter of luck for someone means accepting that the person is not agent responsible for it.

Following Hurley, we will use the term 'thin luck' to denote luck that is the inverse correlate of (agent) responsibility and 'thick luck' to denote luck that is not derivative of the concept of responsibility in this way.

Thick luck can be understood as the absence of control: it is whatever happens to the agent that the agent did not control. The absence of control is necessary and sufficient for thick luck, but the absence of control is neither necessary nor sufficient for thin luck.

The concept of desert: Agent responsibility can be thought to be one of the conditions for attributions of desert and/or desert can be thought to ground attributions of consequential responsibility.

2.3 Responsibility sensitivity and equality of opportunity

Two ways in which responsibility sensitivity relates to equality of opportunity: 1) The extent to which equality of opportunity is a precondition for egalitarian responsibility sensitivity. 2) When, if at all, requirements of responsibility sensitivity depart from the requirements of equality of opportunity.

Three possibilities:

a. Specifying what responsibility sensitivity requires is simply specifying what genuine equality of opportunity requires: nothing more and nothing less.

b. Egalitarian responsibility sensitivity is a specific version/subset of equality of opportunity. Advocating responsibility sensitivity therefore requires appealing to both the value of equality of opportunity and some other value(s).

c. Responsibility sensitivity conflicts with equality of opportunity. There are two possibilities here. First, equality of opportunity may be thought to require elimination of initial brute luck inequalities but not those that occur after the starting point, while responsibility sensitivity may be sensitive to such later brute luck. Second, responsibility sensitivity may not require equality of opportunity since unequal initial opportunities can be compensated for later.

2.4 Collective responsibility

Individual responsibility -- collective responsibility

Focusing on collective responsibility, it shows that individual responsibility has a less prominent role in egalitarian justice than is normally acknowledged.

2.5 Implementing responsibility sensitivity

Worries over adopting responsibility-sensitive policies point to the conceptual difficulties in settling on a robust concept of responsibility; the potential of conditionality to undermine the self-respect of those who are helped and those who are left behind as well as to undermine the most abstract ideals of equal moral worth and equal social status of every person; informational difficulties in gathering the type of information that would be needed to determine who is responsible for their (dis)advantage or to test whether a given system allows people to self-select into the right categories; and, to mention one more, the costliness of setting up the necessary administrative system.