Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change 9781442677364

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
PART I: MORAL OBJECTIVES
A: BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: NEEDS
B: BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY
C: BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: LIFE PLANS ANSWERING TO PERSONAL PREFERENCES
D: JUSTICE AND THE COMMON GOOD
PART II: RULES
PART III: THE FORMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1955-1997
INDEX

Citation preview

MORAL OBJECTIVES, RULES, AND THE FORMS OF SOCIAL C H A N G E

Fruit from forty years' writing, these essays by David Braybrooke take up an assortment of practical concerns that ethics brings into politics: people's interests; needs along with preferences; work and commitment to work; participation in social life. Essays follow on justice and the common good. One essay (new in this collection) explodes the oddly entrenched belief that utilitarianism sacrifices happiness for some people to greater pleasure for others. Parts II and III of the book deal with settled social rules, devices for securing the objectives just treated. Part II shows that rules go hand in hand with virtues, and, in social phenomena, with causal regularities. Part III captures dialectic in history in a logical analysis of how rules (policies) can be prudent by keeping within incremental limits, yet imaginative enough to escape the recent embarrassments generated by social choice theory. Versatile in topic and style, Braybrooke lights up all these subjects. One reader has commented, 'Braybrooke's prose is elegant and always a pleasure to read. Some of the pieces are nothing short of brilliant/ DAVID BRAYBROOKE is McCulloch Professor of Philosophy and Politics Emeritus at Dalhousie University, with which he retains in spite of retirement a perennially active connection. He is also, in retirement from Dalhousie, active at the University of Texas at Austin, where, holding the Centennial Commission Chair in the Liberal Arts, he is Professor of Government and Professor of Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Among the works he has published in recent years are the Philosophy of Social Science (1987), Meeting Needs (1987), and (as co-author) Logic on the Track of Social Change (1995).

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DAVID BRAYBROOKE

Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4169-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8031-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Philosophy Editors: James R. Brown and Calvin Normore

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Braybrooke, David Moral objectives, rules, and the forms of social change (Toronto studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4169-8 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8031-6 (pbk.) 1. Ethics. I. Title. II. Series. BJ1012.B731998

170

C97-932247-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

To the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie and all those who one decade after another have made it for me and others an unparalleled milieu for philosophical activity.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE

IX

Xi

PART I MORAL OBJECTIVES A: BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: NEEDS 1 Needs and Interests 9 2 Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 15 B: 3 4 5

BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 35 The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 54 Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 85

C: BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: LIFE PLANS ANSWERING TO PERSONAL PREFERENCES 6 From Economics to Aesthetics: The Rectification of Preferences 115 7 Preferences Opposed to the Market: Grasshoppers vs Ants on Security, Inequality, and Justice 127 D: 8 9 10 11

JUSTICE AND THE COMMON GOOD Liberalism, Statistics, and the Presuppositions of Utilitarianism 145 Justice and Injustice in Business 164 Making Justice Practical 205 The Common Good 220

viii Contents PART II RULES 12 No Rules without Virtues; No Virtues without Rules 233 13 How Do I Presuppose Thee? Let Me Count the Ways: The Relations of Regularities to Rules in Social Science 249 PART III THE FORMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 14 Marxism and Technical Change: Nicely Told, but Not the Full Contradictory Story 272 15 Refinements of Culture in Large-Scale History 282 16 Scale, Combination, Opposition: A Rethinking of Incrementalism 311 17 Policy Formation with Issue Processing and Transformation of Issues 331 BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1955-1997 349 INDEX

359

Acknowledgments

Money from the research fund attached to the chair that I took up at the University of Texas at Austin on going emeritus at Dalhousie has been used to supply, in lieu of a grant-in-aid for publication from Ottawa, a subvention for publishing this book; and to pay research assistants who gave me indispensable help in putting this collection together: Daylian Cain and Jan Sutherland in Halifax; Brent Lollis in Austin. I thank them all for exceptionally discriminating, conscientious, and efficient work; and I also thank the corps of volunteer research assistant assistants that Brent Lollis charmed into working with him on this project, especially Beverly Salas, also Dominic Holland and Isabel Puentmann. I must thank in addition Alice Braybrooke, whose perceptive and knowledgeable care in sorting out my papers in the Dalhousie University Archives made locating specific essays as straightforward as it could have been made. On the point of publication, I must add thanks to people at the University of Toronto Press, not all of whom I can name. I can name Ron Schoeffel, the editor-in-chief, thanking him for the enthusiasm with which he took up the project of publishing this collection and carried it through to final approval; and Jim Brown and Calvin Normore, thanking them for endorsing the take-up. I can name also Barb Porter, in the Editorial Department, and Kate Baltais, the copy-editor; and thank both of them for judicious professional services. Before they got to work, the standard procedures at the Press brought in three anonymous referees, whom I thank for words of praise (interestingly divergent in application) and for useful suggestions, to which I have tried to give effect. For last-minute bibliographical help in Austin, I am indebted to Michael McLendon; and for reviewing and checking the index, I am further indebted to Beverly Salas.

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Preface

The essays collected in this book are by form and original occasion very diverse. Most are journal articles or chapters in books intended for professional audiences, some are book reviews, some are articles for an encyclopedia, one is a chapter from a multi-authored textbook. The essays are diverse, too, in style, in philosophical approach, and in level of sophistication. I hope that the diversity will make the book more interesting and more fun to read. It shows a philosopher at work in a variety of ways, trying to make sense of a variety of topics for a variety of audiences. It affords relief now and then from strenuous professional arguments (and even these have some light-hearted moments). Looking through the pieces directed at general audiences, sophisticated readers may take some pleasure in reading over my shoulder and seeing how far I succeed in putting judicious nuances into my treatment of familiar issues. But these general-level pieces also have points to make that are unfamiliar enough to repay professional attention, as do the book reviews, even in detachment from the books that they comment upon. The selection is intended to be reasonably rigorous in respect to themes. Aiming at connected discussions of the themes set forth in the title of the book, I have left out several essays on rational choice and personal preferences. I have also left out, along with essays on topics more distant than those from the stated themes, essays devoted more to close criticism of other philosophers' work (e.g., Gauthier's) than to advancing my own ideas. There is, moreover, only so much intersection with my other books, published and forthcoming, as the development of the themes of the present book requires. That is enough, of course, to bring about some coincidence of preoccupations. So there is some reflection here of ideas in the other books,

xii Preface about incrementalism in policy choices, democratic theory, issue processing, ethics in business, the concept of needs, the philosophy of the social sciences, the logic of rules applied to social change, and natural law modernized. The ideas put forward in those books have been left, for the most part, to go on working there. Even so, some of the main lines of my account of needs come into one paper after another, in papers by title ostensibly on other topics. That is not a fact that amounts just to my returning again and again to a theme more often attracting me, early and late, than I had realized before I put this collection together. It signifies that the subject of needs has been a springboard that repeatedly propels me into a different perspective in ethics and in social and political philosophy from the one current there under the joint influence of economics and classical utilitarianism. That current perspective rests on ideas about utility and in sophisticated cases on utility reducible to preferences. Things look different in the perspective of needs. I think they look clearer and more tractable, considering the mare's nests of problems that the perspective of utility and preferences has given stage centre to. They are also, not coincidentally, more directly and convincingly related to the thinking of ordinary people trying to make sense as participants in democracy of social policies. Moreover, it is not just participation, work, life plans, the public interest, the Common Good, and justice that look different in the perspective of needs. Utilitarianism itself looks different. In the perspective of needs, it calls for renewed discussion that sets aside the currently received stereotypes. I hoped that the book Meeting Needs would renew the discussion of utilitarianism in this way, but perhaps the argument there needs reinforcement by demonstrating (as this collection, with its repeated resort to the concept, demonstrates) the difference that shifting to the perspective of needs makes to all sorts of problems. I forbear setting forth any account of the virtues, in my eyes, of the system for comparing social policies that makes most effective use of the concept of needs, namely, comparative censuses showing to what extent members of a given population are meeting their needs under different proposed policies, where the censuses are accompanied by a revisionary process. The task of the revisionary process is to find new policy proposals when census results for the received ones deadlock. This system, unlike the felicific calculus, is a version only slightly formalized of ideas in familiar effective use, and it comes with safeguards against sacrificing some benefits to some people, even at the cost of their lives, merely to promote the benefits of others. It ought to revolutionize

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discussions of utilitarianism. The greatest puzzle of my professional life consists in its not so far having any such effect, though I have set the census notion forth in three books: A Strategy of Decision (with C.E. Lindblom), Three Tests for Democracy, and Meeting Needs. In one of the books, Meeting Needs, it is explicitly joined with the revisionary process, and in another, A Strategy of Decision, the context makes the idea of the revisionary process readily available. Perhaps the trouble has been that in the first two expositions the deadlock results were described as defects in the census notion. That they should be understood instead as instigating a search in the revisionary process for new policy proposals came out only in the latest of the three accounts, the one in Meeting Needs, published a quarter of a century after the first printed account, in A Strategy of Decision. Philosophers who came across the census notion unaccompanied by this idea had some reason to dismiss the census notion as having only limited use. In my own case, it took a quarter of a century for me to appreciate that much or most of the power of the notion depended on conjoining it with the revisionary process. I am tempted to try once more to get the attention for the conjunction that it deserves. In this book, however, I shall go no further toward doing so than to include a hitherto unpublished essay in which I argue that the safeguards against victimizing persons that come with the census notion are properly attributed to the great utilitarians - Bentham, Mill, Edgeworth, and Sidgwick. Because of assumptions that it would have been absurd of them not to make about the application of the felicific calculus, these writers never anticipated that opponents of utilitarianism would argue from Bentham's sketch of the calculus that utilitarianism licensed (even prescribed) victimization. It was a sketch that not only misled on this point; it got the pioneering attempt which utilitarianism involved to make use of statistics in assessing policy proposals off on the wrong path - even under the safeguards alluded to; it was the wrong path because it was not a path that led to effective comparisons of distributive consequences. Why did Bentham's successors not appreciate that it was the wrong path? But even that can be explained, by pointing to reliance on surrogate concepts the satisfaction of which could reasonably be expected to promote happiness in degrees that a felicific calculus, were one ever to be carried out, would demonstrate. Only enough will be said here about the Common Good, which will figure throughout a book to come about natural law modernized, to make two points: first, to intimate how it consolidates the objectives

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relating to needs, work, and overall life plans, and reconciles these personal objectives in general plans for cooperation among persons; and, second, to have it present as a foundation for justice and rights. The ideas in the cluster of essays on alienation and its remedies, on participation and on satisfying work, have not been brought together before. These are subjects that, as Marx saw, are of great importance to people in their daily lives, but philosophical discussions of ethics have only rarely visited the subject of work and rarely made any connection between work and participation. Not previously brought together either have been the ideas in the cluster on freeing preferences regarding life plans from the grip of the market, yet rectifying them as aesthetic and other considerations relating to ethics and happiness may demand. The unqualified emphasis that economists put on preferences is misguided, but nonetheless ethics requires a delicate balance be struck in social arrangements and in personal psychology between meeting human needs and encouraging people to cultivate their preferences. The essays on 'Justice and Injustice in Business' and on 'Making Justice Practical' give complementary accounts of an idea that I have not propounded elsewhere (or seen anyone else propound): How to reach agreement on what justice requires by first identifying actions that every discussant will agree depart from justice and then asking what conditions on social arrangements must be accepted if the number and impact of such departures is to be minimized. The conditions turn out to require a much closer approach to equal distribution of income and wealth than libertarians mean to make; yet they will be hard put to reject the conditions, since the departures to be minimized include invasions by some (for example, the rich) of the liberties and property rights of others (for example, the not so rich). The book devotes itself for the rest of its length, one way or another, to the subject of rules, that is, settled social rules or proposals for establishing such. It moves first to consider their part, which cannot be suppressed, in ethics, even in the practice of virtues, and then considers how they are defining features of social structures and cultures. There, too, they are irreplaceable, even by the observable regularities with which they are intimately associated, as objects demanding study. As defining features of social structures and cultures, when rules change, they sometimes involve important aspects of social change, and it is worthwhile in those cases at least tracking changes in social rules as precisely as possible. An appropriate instrument for doing this is a logic

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of rules. My most ambitious work on this topic has gone into another book, Logic on the Track of Social Change, with Bryson Brown and Peter Schotch, but the further case studies in that book and the logic used in them do not entirely supersede the earlier studies, applying another logic of rules (von Wright's), one of which I reprint here. Some of the attention given to rules in the third and concluding part of the present book involves attention to Marx and has the dialectic (whether Marx's or Engels's) in view. I am not a Marxist in any simple sense any more than I am a utilitarian. Yet I regard Marx, in spite of subsequent developments that he did not foresee, as still the most searching critic of capitalism and its political consequences, and Marx ranks with utilitarianism and with St Thomas as one of the chief sources of the topics that I have spent my life thinking about. I would like to think that the style in which I treat the topics reflects the influence of the philosophers whom I have thought of as my guiding stars - Norman Malcolm, J.L. Austin, and C.G. Hempel - but I do not know whether any visible reflection is easily discerned. The influence of my training in ordinary language philosophy is discernible in many of the pieces, maybe in all, and it is especially manifest in the essays on 'Alienation' and 'Participation,' which were written in the spirit of ordinary language philosophy in its heyday. Austin might have accepted them as contributions to his dreamed-of philosophical dictionary, where philosophers, agreeing to a division of labour, would have treated one by one all the philosophically puzzling terms in the language. He would perhaps have been astonished to find 'participation' included among those terms, and very surprised to find 'the alienation of labour.' But these applications demonstrate, I hope, the capacity of ordinary language philosophy to deliver illumination even on topics peripheral to the usual preoccupations of philosophers, and they may suggest that the ordinary language approach was given up too soon. Marxism recedes from view in the final three essays. These concern the changes in social rules and hence in culture that created the civil service in Britain, a retrospective essay on incrementalism in social change, including changes in social rules, and an essay on the transformation of issues as the key to breaking out of deadlocks in deliberation on policies. Incrementalism makes social change and compromise easier by making it at any given moment less consequential; and deadlocks need not lead to hostilities, since they need not persist. After contemplating the dialectic of history and the fire of revolution, the book will thus close on a mild and optimistic note.

xvi Preface Only minimal changes have been made in the essays originally printed elsewhere: striking out some redundant phrasing; striking out also a few statements that may not be redundant, but the intention and bearing of which I can no longer discern; correcting some minor errors; adding a word or two of clarification. In the one place in which I have detected a considerable outright mistake, I have added a corrective footnote. I have added notes to the older essays where some defence of the currency of their arguments in 1998 seemed called for. There are many places in which I could perhaps improve on my original phrasing, but it would substantially falsify the historical record to introduce improvements now. There are also, no doubt, a number of outright mistakes that I have not detected even on rereading. They make a doubly significant contribution to the historical record, since I in effect made them twice over, demonstrating a certain incorrigibility in myself if not in the text.

PART I:

MORAL OBJECTIVES

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The basic moral objectives treated here are meeting needs, satisfaction in work, and opportunities to develop preferences and live accordingly. So far as moral objectives are thought of as objectives to be realized in individual lives, this is an exhaustive list, since under the third head there is ample room for anything else, consistent or not, to figure - happiness, authenticity, autonomy, and even mystic practices. I would not claim that it is the only exhaustive list; and I recognize that one might regard the first and second heads as redundant, since they, too, could be absorbed under the third head. To think of provisions for needs as objects of preferences and obtaining them as conditions for having any preferences heeded, including further ones, is at least an approximation to thinking of needs in the way that they claim universal attention in social policy. Satisfaction in work, for its part, is certainly a matter of preference, and its importance is borne out by the importance given it in various life plans answering to developed preferences. Nevertheless, I would resist collapsing the three heads into one, and argue that whatever the merits of other, equally exhaustive lists they will not entirely supersede the merits of this one. Needs cannot in the end be treated merely as conditions for having any preferences heeded, since people sometimes prefer not to have those conditions met (they commit suicide, for example). Nor can needs merely be objects of preference, because people's preferences (we say, making what is often a vital moral point) may run quite counter to their needs. There is something illuminating about the relation of these concepts and about their use in political discussion that comes from treating needs as matters to be taken care of before matters of preference only come into consideration. It is illuminating, moreover, to pause on the subject of satisfying work before moving on to matters of preference only. This is so in part just because most philosophers have neglected the subject; but is so also because philosophers, especially utilitarian philosophers, have converged with economists in an inclination to look to consumption and preferences about consumption for the grounds of comprehensive evaluations of productive activity. In principle there is a place for the disutilities and utilities of labour in any individual person's preference map, but the notion of a preference map is generally one of something drawn up as the map of a consumer's preferences (and so designated). It is hard, because it is somewhat paradoxical, to keep a place for productive activity among the ends of production. Work fits awkwardly into the means-ends distinction, or, perhaps it would be better to say, it fits in too easily and gets set aside when discussion moves on to questions of

4 Moral Objectives ends. To speak of it as an 'end in itself also brings in excessively fancy philosophical terminology. It is an important subject for all that, both for individual persons and for social arrangements. Work is also, among the three heads, perhaps the one that most directly brings up questions about moral objectives that transcend anything that could be achieved for individual persons in isolation. For clearly the satisfactions of work very largely arise from working with other people, appreciating their cooperation, and being appreciated in turn. Moral objectives concerning work thus have to do with social arrangements fostering these mutual satisfactions. But the moral objectives that concern the other two heads also have to do not just with personal satisfactions in isolated lives, but with satisfactions obtained in the company of other people - family, friends, lovers, fellow citizens - and with social arrangements that give everyone in a given society a decent chance of such satisfactions, individual and joint. Thus discussion about these matters must move on to resolve controversies about the justice of such arrangements, and then to an outline at least of how all the moral objectives surveyed can find their place in the Common Good. By the time all these things have been discussed, even to the limited extent that they are discussed in this book, a fairly comprehensive discussion of ethical theory at a level just below (or is it just above?) meta-ethics will have been offered, with a number of applications at levels even closer to specific policies. I have views about meta-ethics. They amount, given a basic commitment to concern for other beings and readiness to enter into rational moral discourse, to a moral realism sufficient to accord truth values to moral judgments. Given the commitment, moral judgments are true or false as well as moving by the standard of concern for other beings, elaborated in the ways that the idea of the Common Good elaborates it. Yet I would think that the discussions of moral objectives in this book will be compatible with a great variety of meta-ethical views, not just my own. So I shall not argue for my meta-ethical views here. The issues of metaethics (like, perhaps, the most basic issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language) go on escaping resolution in spite of the efforts of many searching intellects. Philosophy can in the meanwhile continually accomplish in the clarification of concepts a lot of things useful to human beings here and now in their attempts to live together harmoniously and successfully. Just what use these accomplishments are to be put to will vary of course with time and circumstance, and further philosophical discussion may supersede the

Introduction to Part I 5 accomplishments. One might wonder whether some of the essays collected here have more of a claim to figure in the collection than that they were good enough pieces in their time and deserve to figure in a historical record of my work (though these may be deserts enough for inclusion in the book). There have been studies of the alienation of labour since I published mine, and many studies after mine of the limitations of the theory of consumer behaviour in respect to its reliance on uncriticized preferences. Are we in difficulties about work? Employment, in the United States, and productivity have increased to levels that may make anxieties about work and distributive justice seem no longer urgent. Globalization may seem to have made distributive remedies unfeasible anyway. Would not any attempt at them by domestic measures of taxation simply set capital into flight abroad? In brief notes at the end of each of the essays in which these things are matters of concern I contend, with what I trust are telling references to the current literature and the current scene, that the arguments in the essays repay continued attention.

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BASIC MORAL O B J E C T I V E S : NEEDS

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1

Needs and Interests

The concept of needs, and along with it the concept of what is in a person's interest, can play a useful and distinctive part in personal life and also in public policy. To see this, however, one first needs to be persuaded that what answers to people's interests does not reduce to what answers to their preferences. This can be done if interest is defined as at bottom - bedrock - what meets needs, adding that interest also extends upward to include the command of any resources that could be converted into provisions for needs. However, this very definition will withstand reduction only if needs themselves remain distinct from preferences. It will withstand supersession by preferences or some other arguably more precise consideration only if - a second major problem the concept of needs can be shown to give firm guidance to decisions personal or public over a wide range of important issues. The distinction between what is in one's interest and what one prefers enables us to identify in a straightforward way cases, often of great significance to prudence or to morals, in which people insist on preferring things that run counter to their interests. Sometimes people prefer to indulge themselves in ways dangerous to their health, or to their solvency. Sometimes - as a matter for observers to honor as heroism or to deplore as exploitation - people prefer to put the needs, even the pleasures, of others ahead of their own interest. Regardless of such cases, many thinkers, especially economists and Reprinted from Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte Becker (New York: Garland, 1992), vol. II, 894-7. Copyright ©1992 by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker and reprinted by their permission and the per^mission of Garland Publishing.

10 Moral Objectives political scientists, incline to reduce interests to preferences of some sort. This would wipe out the distinction that the cases call for. It does not suffice to make the distinction to stipulate that the preferences which are to count under interests must be fully informed preferences. People who are fully aware of the debilitation that they are inviting go on smoking and drinking too much. People fully aware of the degree to which they are being exploited by their lovers may prefer to stay with them. On the other hand, it does not set needs aside to define interests as comprising conditions for having preferences heeded. For what are these conditions at their most basic but so many needs, which, unmet, impair normal functioning in the pursuit of preferences, or in the performance of duties? Furthermore, no conditions apply to all preferences. Some people, on the point of death, perhaps by their own hands, prefer to cease having any other preferences heeded. Some people, like prisoners on a hunger strike after setting their quarters on fire, reject provisions that are conditions normally indispensable to heeding preferences. They prefer not to have these conditions met, just because they are not in a position to have the preferences that they most cherish heeded. What people prefer often, of course, does coincide with what is in their interest; and this is one consideration that attracts people to conflating the two concepts. Another consideration, no doubt, is the fact that other things being equal people are well advised to bring about the coincidence, though this advice does best to assume that the coincidence is to be brought about not by having interests conform to preferences, but the other way around. Subtler considerations than either of these may operate. Interfering with the use of one's resources makes the resources less valuable. The interference (e.g., prohibiting the purchase of addictive drugs) sometimes serves as an indispensable guarantee of meeting one's needs; and then it does not contravene one's interest, though it may be resented as paternalism. Even in those cases, one might oppose the interference on the ground that it may generalize too easily to other uses of resources, to options left after needs have been taken care of. Is it the threat to having one's preferences heeded that endangers one's interest? This does not follow. It suffices to make the generalized interference out as contrary to one's interest to show that it has reduced the value of one's resources, making them less convertible, if occasion should demand, into provisions directly meeting needs. Suppose now that you have contributed some funds to a club, to which you belong chiefly because it promotes an end that you hold

Needs and Interests 11 dear - removing billboards, say. The club is about to revise its budget to divert the funds that it has raised from the anti-billboard campaign to something in which you take no interest - neighborhood synchronized swimming. You have the anti-billboard campaign at heart; but is it against your interest for the club to turn to synchronized swimming? This does not affect your present command of resources, much less your present provisions for meeting needs. One might infer that the line between interests and mere preferences runs between resources convertible (or still to be committed) and sunk costs (to be set aside in future-looking choices). Is it perhaps too subtle a line - too inconspicuous - for the ordinary wear and tear of a natural language? Perhaps, however, the distinction can survive not having a gap all along the line. So it is not ruinous to concede that, in circumstances like those described, an implication bridges the gap leading from preferences that have been acted upon to its now being in one's interest to see them through to being heeded. Even if for most of its length the gap runs unbridged and unfilled, however, the footing for the distinction calls for further inspection on the interest side. Our ideas about needs have seemed to many too infirm to stand upon. What sort of bedrock can it be if it is as fluid as quicksand? The concept of needs works well in sorting out social policies only when it works within a horizon of surplus resources. It breaks down as a guide to policy when it is pressed so far (which it may be in the demands for medical care fostered by advanced technology) as to gobble up resources without end. In the absence of a surplus, however the absence comes about, making minimal provision for needs will leave no room to do anything else; meeting one need or one person's need may conflict with meeting another. There is no common denominator among needs; there is no stable order of priorities among them either. Furthermore, the concept of needs is promiscuously abused - the country 'needs' whatever will increase the sale of fighter planes; I 'need' a new suit, when I have bought a dozen within the past few months. Multiple uses of the concept and cultural variation encourage the promiscuity. Maybe, in a way, I do need a new suit to keep up my fashionable image. No wonder many sophisticated thinkers, led by the economists, have left the concept in disgust, to set up camp exclusively with preferences. Abandoned as a basis for choosing social policy, can needs still serve in the definition of interests? It does not have to be abandoned in either connection. The multiple uses can be sorted out and the cultural variation coped with. Let the

12 Moral Objectives needs of groups or institutions (what the Liberal Party needs to do to survive, or to win the next election) be distinguished from needs ascribed to individual members of human populations. Among these human needs, adventitious needs, which come and go with particular projects, peel off from needs, for food, for security, for companionship, that must be met through life, or throughout stages that every life traverses, in our species (and in others). Some needs that not everyone is expected to have - special needs, like a special need for refined musical experience - resemble these course-of-life needs in their importance for some people to normal functioning and well-being; such needs have a similar part to play in defining interests when they are present. Social policy, however, dealing with large numbers of people, often must be content with making provisions for needs that everyone may be presumed to have. These are, just for that reason, less controversial; and with them we have the best chance of getting down to bedrock. If we got down all the way, we could entirely escape a remaining difficulty. This has to do with cultural variation, which reflects the variability of conventions. No options in conventions can undermine the grounds for ascribing to human beings a need for water or a need for an environment cooler than 150 degrees E At this depth, however, the little that we make of needs falls far short of what even very grudging political systems are ready to do in making minimal provisions for needs, for example, in taking care of long-term prisoners. Those provisions typically come in packets with conventional features - recognizing, for example, in a cold climate a need not just for some clothing, but for shirt, sweater, trousers, and boots. The conventional features do not detract seriously from the stability of the concept of needs within any given policy-making community, where consensus on the packets reflects consensus that the conventions that shape them are well nigh as inexorable for the people affected as the bare universal needs that they surround. Given this consensus, varying in respect to generosity and in respect to the conventions from community to community, and given a surplus of resources, social policy may sensibly aim at making the packets available to everyone for whom the community assumes responsibility. The lack of a common denominator among needs is no obstacle, either to the final realization of this goal or en route. En route, the community can abide by the rule of continuing to meet the needs now being met and moving on to serve more needs or to provide for more people. The inter-

Needs and Interests 13 personal comparisons that show the way do not require weighting or aggregating preferences, a great problem otherwise. The comparisons rest on matters (so many people literate; such a proportion of the population adequately housed) that census takers can readily discover. No effective substitute for the concept of needs in personal life or in public policy has come forward. Attempts to found policy choices on preferences alone have forfeited the moral concern that other people's needs awaken, much more powerfully than other people's preferences. The attempts to rely on preferences alone have also created intractable problems inherited from utilitarianism about distinguishing between better and worse preferences; or, if every preference is to be given as much weight as every other, have created problems equally intractable about the impossibility, revealed by Arrow's Theorem, of guaranteeing that different people's preferences will aggregate into a reasonable social ordering. This richness of embarrassments borders on the grotesque; it was embarrassment enough to find to begin with that preferences alone fail to make sense either of prudence or of self-sacrifice. Annotated Bibliography Barry, Brian. Political Argument. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. See pp. 174-86 for a discussion of interests that emphasizes command of resources at the expense of the place for needs, given a dismissive account pp. 47-9. Braybrooke, David. Meeting Needs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Defends the concept of needs against the economists; examines its use in policy choices, and relates it to other standards for social policy. Mansbridge, Jane. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Reprinted by University of Chicago Press. Contains a representative attempt, far more judicious than most, to reduce interests to preferences. See esp. pp. 24-8 and pp. 342-4. Sen, Amartya. Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970. Gives a thorough account of Arrow's theorem and its implications. On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) and (with others) The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) are instances of Sen's efforts to escape in the direction of a needs standard from principles of social choice resting on preferences alone. Soper, Kate. On Human Needs. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981. Subtle discussion, in a Marxist perspective, of political aspects of needs. Thomson, Garrett. Needs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. A careful philosophical analysis of the strengths of the concept of needs.

14 Moral Objectives Thurow, Lester. Toward a Definition of Economic Justice.' The Public Interest, 31 (Spring 1973), 56-80, at p. 66. Sets forth in one small compass the superficial reasons characteristically advanced by economists to dismiss the concept of needs.

2

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings

Two conceptions of needs' - it might be better to say, Two conceptions of besoins/ since it is the use of 'besoins' in the French texts that I shall be directly dealing with.1 There is much the same range of use for the term 'Beduerfnisse' in the German texts. The English translation of Das Kapital that I have used resolves - or conceals - the extent of the range by using 'wants' for one conception and 'needs' for the other. Yet 'needs' could have figured where 'wants' does (it does in the translation of the Grundrisse that I have used) - not quite so felicitously, nevertheless without any glaring solecism. In the face of the maximally dismissive thesis that Marx has only one conception of needs, a fully generalized one that has no distinctively compelling feature, I can mount an argument showing that this cannot be so, by resorting to 'needs' throughout as my point of departure and showing how different contexts require different senses. This strategy also gets closer than the English translation to Marx's own language, in German or in French. 1.0. The place of the concept of needs in Marx's thinking is problematic. 1.1. Some students of Marx (for example, Venable, Duncan, Heller)2 have found it natural to portray him as holding that capitalism fails because it does not meet human needs. They also portray him as holding that the first social system to do so will be the system that succeeds capitalism. Reprinted from On the Track of Reason: Essays in Honor ofKai Nielsen, ed. Roger Beehler, David Copp, and Bela Szabados (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 119-33. Copyright © 1992 by Westview Press. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press.

16 Moral Objectives 1.2. Other students vigorously deny that Marx has a doctrine of needs, or uses the concept with any special emphasis. I do not know how many take this view, but the fact that Althusser is among them suffices to make it a view to reckon with.3 1.3. Careful examination of Marx's writings shows that neither thesis can be sustained in a simple form. The first, emphasizing the failure to meet needs, runs contrary to Marx's generalized use of the concept of needs. In this use, many needs are either questionable or inconsequential. The thesis is also somewhat at odds with the fact that the generalized use intersects with his beliefs about the expansion of needs, which balloon with desires up and away from any fixed list of basic ineluctable needs or even from such a list enlarged to include requirements that are ineluctable once they appear in the course of history. The second thesis, denying needs any special place, fails to register another use - another conception of needs - that figures prominently in Marx's writings and plays an indispensable part at once in his findings about the character of capitalism and in the implications of the abundance that he foresees under the successor system. 2.0. In Capital and other economic writings, one conception of needs generalizes the term 'needs' (/besoins/ 'Beduerfhisse') to cover approximately the same ground as 'wants' stretches to cover, that is, the ground covered together by 'needs' in ordinary English, restrictively used, and by 'desires/ The other conception corresponds to the ordinary restrictive use in which people are said to have 'needs' not for plum pudding or jewelry, but for food or exercise, to illustrate the use with primary needs that it covers in every epoch. The illustration does not prejudice the possibility that the restrictive use may cover more in later stages of development. 2.1. The generalized term goes hand in hand with 'utility' generalized as economists (including Marx) have long generalized that term. The generalization leaves behind the possibility of people's having needs that they do not desire to meet - that they may not even be aware of which is a feature of the restricted use of 'needs.' Left behind, too, is the assumption that people will desire to meet the needs covered by that restrictive use (an assumption that is at best only a rough approximation of the truth). Alternatively, for now, it may be assumed that only needs that do give rise to desires are to be counted, since only these are effective in the market. Whenever Marx is explicit about generalizing 'needs/ the context is always one in which he is declaring that answering to a need guarantees an object's having a use value, which in turn is

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 17 a necessary condition of its having an exchange value. He often recalls this conditional relation, and it may safely be taken that he is, on these occasions of recall, using the term in the generalized way.4 2.2. On the other hand, there are many passages (in fact, more numerous passages) in which the restrictive use occurs. When it does, the term 'needs' is almost always qualified: Marx refers to 'natural needs,' 'physical needs,' or (at least once) to 'necessary needs/ To these passages we may assimilate others in which the term 'needs' itself does not appear, but Marx writes of 'the first necessities of life,' 'the means of subsistence/ 'the means necessary for maintenance and conservation,' 'the means necessary for maintenance and reproduction/ 'the means of existence/ or 'the conditions of existence.' All these phrases, except for the last, may be taken to refer to objects of 'needs' in the restrictive sense; and 'the conditions' of the last phrase can be regarded as the conditions that are met by meeting needs in the restrictive sense. Marx consistently refrains from using any of this terminology when the generalized conception of 'needs' is meant.5 2.3. There are passages in which the term 'needs' could be read as signifying either of the two conceptions. 2.3.1. In some of these - passages in which Marx is discussing the interrelation of production and consumption and the part each has to play in forming needs - the generalized use seems to fit best. For instance: In Wage Labor and Capital, Marx says, 'A substantial increase in wages implies a rapid growth in productive capital, which elicits a growth equally rapid of riches, of luxury, of needs and of social enjoyments'; and, further, winding up the paragraph that began with the sentence just quoted, 'Our needs and our enjoyments have their source in society; the measure of them, therefore, is to be found in society, and not in the objects of their satisfaction. Being of social origin, our needs are relative by nature.'6 2.3.2. In other passages, both readings seem equally strongly invited: either there are no grounds in the texts for excluding one or the other or (as with some passages about needs in the future society) there are grounds supporting both readings. An instance of the former is the passage in Capital in which Marx says that 'capital, in the course of its development becomes ... a coercive relation within which the working class is constrained to carry out more labor than is required by the narrow circle of its needs.'7 An instance of the latter, where there are grounds for both readings, is the passage in the Paris mss. of 1844 in which Marx speaks of communist workers developing a need for fraternity.8

18 Moral Objectives 3.0. The generalized use is central and indispensable to Marx's analysis of exchange value. However, the restrictive use is equally central and indispensable to his account of the wage rate under a regime of exchange value. It is also integral to his conception of the hardships actually suffered under capitalism by the working class; and thus it figures prominently (though here not indispensably) in his critique of the failures of capitalism. 3.1. In Marx's view (as in everyone else's), the primary needs must be met if the human beings in the labor force are to maintain themselves and produce the human beings who in due time will replace them. The cost in quantity of labor of meeting these needs is thus the cost of reproduction of labor power and hence the normal or long-run exchange value of labor power.9 3.1.1. Yet Marx insists that the primary or 'natural' needs have a conventional aspect. The forms of provision that are sought and accepted depend on past history and on the degree of civilization attained. Modern workers require shirts, trousers, and shoes; this used not to be so.10 3.1.2. Would people, however, actually fail to survive and procreate if conventional forms of provision are not forthcoming? Modern workers, one would think, could like their ancestors make do, if they were forced to, with one-piece garments and clogs. Marx might have argued that fewer people would marry if the conventional provisions were not forthcoming; or that embarrassment would not stop there: more people would die by suicide or from psychosomatic diseases. However, so far as I know, he does not so argue; and thus he leaves a little looseness in the notion of necesssary subsistence. 3.1.3. There is an indeterminacy also (acknowledged by Marx) having to do with longevity.11 Might not lives shortened because they were spent in strenuous labor give up the same quantity of labor (input) overall, or more, and still extend long enough to make sure of replacements? The identities of the people supplying the labor power would simply horrifyingly - change more rapidly. Marx is, notwithstanding, more inclined to treat shortened lives as evidence that primary needs are not being met, and that labor power is selling below its normal exchange value.12 3.1.4. There is a further indeterminacy about the total wages bill and the size of the labor force supported by it. How does the total wages bill relate to amounts laid out by public authorities on poor relief? How many unemployed workers are maintained by the wages of kith and kin still at work? Or to ask essentially the same question in another way,

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 19 what exactly is the size of the labor force supported by the total wages bill? Does it include unemployed workers as well as employed ones?13 3.1.5. In spite of these questions, it is clear that the restrictive conception has a firm place at the bottom of Marx's theory of wage determination. Hence it also has a firm place at the bottom of his theory of surplus value. Once the amount of (fixed) capital used up has been paid for out of the exchange value of the product, surplus value consists, of course, of the value left over from the exchange value of the product after subtracting the wages that pay for necessary subsistence. Other things being equal, the lower the cost of necessary subsistence, the greater is the amount of surplus value available for appropriation. 3.2. The restrictive conception of needs has an equally important place in Marx's critique of capitalism. One of the charges made in this critique is that capitalism fails to assure the majority of people living under it of the means of meeting their primary needs.14 3.2.1. It is true that Marx found capitalism unacceptable whether or not it had this failing. He detested the motivations and the principles of organization characteristic of capitalism; and he was ready to denounce them even if they proved, contrary to his expectations, capable of furnishing a high material standard of living for everybody.15 3.2.2. Nevertheless, it was important to Marx that capitalism did not in fact have such results and could not be expected to. The proletariat have reasons arising in hardship and suffering for wanting to overturn the system. The system did not and could not meet their primary needs. 3.2.2.1. Marx intensifies the charge by asserting that capitalism constrains workers within the sphere of 'animal needs.'16 3.2.2.2. Though it is not quite clear how these relate to the 'physiological minimum' (since people like animals can survive without thriving), evidently Marx is ready to charge capitalism with failing to meet whatever is the least exacting test, that minimum or the minimal animal needs.17 This is where evidence about workers' shortened lives comes to bear. 3.2.2.3. The general charge of failing to assure the majority of the means of subsistence can be understood to be compatible with an increase in population. However, given that an increase in population may occur as lives are shortened, even failing to meet the physiological minimum or the minimal animal needs is compatible with this. Moreover, some stress must be put on the term 'assure.' While most people most of the time are getting enough to sustain shortened lives and yet multiply, parts of the working class fall below this level; and no part has

20 Moral Objectives any assurance that its turn will not come at any moment, starving or too weak from lack of good food to fend off contagions in overcrowded and insanitary quarters, to end miserably.18 4.0. Analysis of Marx's expectations about the successor social system will reveal other ways in which the restrictive conception of needs plays important roles in his thinking. Before, however, we pursue our path through that analysis we may consider what can be made of those expectations, interpreting them with the generalized use of 'needs' in mind. 4.1. Marx looks forward to the removal, in the course of the change to the future society, of any persisting limits to human development. Needs as the generalized conception looks upon them - 'desire needs' will expand indefinitely and so will the material production to meet them.19 4.1.1. It might have been more plausible for Marx to have distinguished between the removal of existing socially contingent limits to human development and the removal even of such limits to the plasticity of the human character as biology and the necessary conditions of social order lay down. However, so far as I know, he did not make this distinction. 4.1.2. In any case, he has in mind only expansion on lines that favor mutual thriving. A good deal of the expansion of desire needs that has occurred under capitalism will be cancelled (raising a question about whether there will be a net expansion overall when the successor society comes in). (So, we might say, though Marx does not clearly distinguish this topic from the topic of expansion in desire needs, might some of any expansion that may have occurred under capitalism of needs in the restrictive sense, along with the conventions that made certain means of meeting these needs indispensable.) 4.2. Capitalism limits human development by restricting many people to the narrow sphere of 'animal needs' - reducing the condition of some below even that standard.20 It also, perhaps even more tellingly and fundamentally, limits it by fostering conflicts of interest in an ideologically perpetuated situation of scarcity and thus giving everyone's desire needs an egoistic cast.21 In the neighborhood of these ideas that Marx gives some footing for a distinction between true and false needs. 4.2.1. Yet Marx's critique of desire needs can make several moves without invoking this distinction. 4.2.1.1. Progress from animal desire needs to truly human desire needs could occur without wholly discrediting the former. Food is the

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 21 object both of a primary need and of a desire need; and the desire need for food survives in the desire need for a balanced and appetizing diet. 4.2.1.2. Similarly, removing the egoistic cast from a desire need may leave the desire need standing, otherwise unchanged. One may continue to have a desire need for exercise, but now specifically for exercise with other people, with a community-oriented purpose. (A football player may desire fitness not so much for his personal benefit as for the stronger contribution that he will be able to make to the success of the team.) 4.2.2. Yet both sorts of progress just mentioned could be represented as progress from falsely conceived desire needs to desire needs truly conceived, taking as the standard for these the desire needs present under the social arrangements that enable human beings to thrive best. A balanced and appetizing diet serves primary needs better and hence is more judiciously chosen as the object of the desire need for food. Human beings, if they understand their own nature, will have desire needs that are governed by commitments to community. (On this point, Marx's thinking would accord with traditional natural law thinking about the common good.) Marx does not elaborate on the distinction between true and false needs. However, he does characterize some of the desire needs found under capitalism as 'inhuman cravings' artificially and contingently induced.22 (The word 'cravings' suggests that when these are not satisfied, the people concerned will not just feel disappointment, but an upset approaching the upset to personality and character to be expected from not meeting needs in the restrictive sense. The division between the two senses is not always firm.) 4.2.3. With the distinction between true and false needs may be associated the misgivings that Marx shares with many other people about the commercialization of desire needs. 4.2.3.1. Commercialization breaks down distinctions important to ethics; and the resulting confusion of standards facilitates (to say the least) the creation of false needs. Thus love between men and women is a subject important to ethics. Under commercialization many are confused both about what to want in love and what to offer: a sporty car; fashionable clothes and a fashionable haircut; even belonging to a generation self-importantly self-designated by a soda pop manufacturer; and all sorts of other things of no importance to mutual support and loyalty. 4.2.3.2. Capitalism may encourage people to be inflexible in their desires for some of these commercialized attractions; to submit to inexorable conventions that make it impossible to do without them with

22 Moral Objectives equanimity; even to become addicted to them. Such considerations suggest that the distinction between true and false needs could also be drawn within the sphere of needs in the restrictive sense. To do so would not be at odds with Marx's thought about needs; but it is not easy to decide whether it is a distinction already present there or a congenial addition. 4.2.3.3. The cast given by commercialization to desire needs is often one that might like egoism be removed without discrediting the need at bottom. It is perfectly in order with human nature to want love; and not unreasonable to want it with romantic trappings. 4.3. The multiplication of desire needs in the successor society will accompany an expansion of human powers.23 This helps explain why the expansion of desire needs is such a good thing; it goes hand in hand with the liberation (in a direction approved) of human beings from brutish limitations. Both sorts of expansion have occurred under capitalism. They have, unfortunately, occurred only for a privileged minority. 4.3.1. Even there, one might say, the expansion has been one-sided, disproportionately directed into relatively passive branches of consumption, like collecting valuable objects to own and display. 4.3.2. The desire needs characteristic of the successor society will be relatively active ones, that is to say, needs the objects of which, not just the pursuit, require activity, including the active expression of human powers, some of them newly developed. Needs for artistic expression, acting, dancing, painting, playing music will serve as examples. 4.3.2.1. Such needs and powers will not find much scope in industrial labor, which Marx expects to be further mechanized and simplified.24 4.3.2.2. One might consider that the science and engineering which by the design of machinery bring about this simplification would be a typical outlet for human powers, to which workers would advance as they had less and less to do on the assembly line. Marx, however, does not give any sustained attention to this consideration; and hence never has occasion to reflect that it may be very unrealistic to suppose that there would be so many places in science and engineering that masses of workers could advance in this way. 4.3.2.3. He evidently gave more weight to the expectation that the powers, old and new, of fully developed human beings would be exercised, during greatly enlarged free time, if not in artistic expression, in other noble activities like the pursuit of scientific knowledge.25 4.3.2.4. The expanded desire needs of these human beings, it may be inferred, will be such as would suit this way of life; but that does not

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 23 give us much to go on. Even if only modest resources are required for the sorts of art objects created, we should hesitate to infer that there will be in other departments of life only modest desires for material satisfactions. 4.3.2.5. However, given the expectation about lives chiefly devoted to science or art, we can construct a model to explain why Marx expects that the successor society will be free of conflict. 4.3.2.5.1. Suppose that if people's desire needs conflict in ways that exceed even the abundant resources available, the conflicts are readily removed by mutual concessions, in part because no one sets so much store by his or her desire needs as to refuse the concessions. 4.3.2.5.2. Suppose that what remain of everyone's material desire needs, allowing for a good deal of persisting interpersonal variation, are met. Everyone concurs in the decision to meet them and they are met with minimum labor time. 4.3.2.5.3. The free time left over - a maximum under the constraints just specified - will be used in ways that draw further only marginally on social output (for example, watercolors; paper for musical composition; graph paper for mathematical explorations; star charts) and that do not interfere with other people's activities. 4.3.2.5.4. There will be agreement, furthermore, on the public goods (bridges, parks, unfenced amphitheaters) to be produced and the level of production to be reached of these. Everyone will understand just which and what level of public goods will be required to support production for material desire needs and activity in the arts. For example, there will be a schedule (or a succession of schedules) for the use of the amphitheatres that in the long run satisfies everybody. 5.0. Whether human beings can ever agree with one another sufficiently to construct a society on this model is a contingent matter shadowed by doubts arising from the whole course of history, remote and recent. I do not for my part think that it is a wholly impractical idea or that Marx was being soft-headed in entertaining something like it in his vision of communism; but I shall not argue these points here. The point that I want to make at this juncture is a point about the renewed relevance of the restrictive conception of needs. The model just given of a society free of conflict cannot be fully explained without recourse to this other conception - even if the whole critique of needs under capitalism focused, as we have mainly portrayed it, on desire needs. 5.1. The model will not work if there are some desire needs that people - setting aside saints - cannot be expected to give up, and these

24 Moral Objectives desire needs are not met. Such are the desire needs that reflect primary needs for air, water, food, clothing, shelter, companionship, etc. 5.1.1. It is not just a question of appeasing people's appetites so that they will not, famished and desperate, be at one another's throats. 5.1.2. If there is not abundance enough from the outset to meet everybody's primary needs, the projects of the future society requiring net investment will be carried out only at the cost of a return to class conflict. (This was Trotsky's basic criticism of Stalinism, and it is Trotsky, quite as much as laissez-faire libertarians, who has been vindicated by recent events in Eastern Europe.26) 5.1.2.1. People will not go along with those projects voluntarily if they must give up meeting their basic needs. 5.1.2.2. If they are compelled to - as a minority by a majority or (more likely) a majority by a minority - a division between a class making the sacrifice and a class making the decision to invest and imposing it will reappear. 5.1.2.3. Marx expected nothing of the sort.27 5.1.3. Thus, argument brings out an essential role for the ordinary, restricted conception of needs in making sense of Marx's expectations regarding the successor society. 5.2. But the presupposition that the future society will meet primary needs for more people more assuredly than capitalism does is already required to forestall the most elementary objections. Marx clearly did not expect the future society to do worse in meeting primary needs. 5.2.1. It is true that Marx holds explicitly that the conventions affecting provisions for primary needs are subject to change28; and how could they escape change during the expansion of desire needs? 5.2.2. But he would hardly have thought, given past economic progress and his projection of that progress into the future, that the conventions might change in the direction of furnishing a less demanding test of social systems. They would change, with the movement to the successor society, in the other direction. 6.0. Finally, the thesis about the expansion of needs in the future society itself requires a supplementary reading in which the needs are understood in the restrictive sense (though this reading will not exclude freely formed desire needs from an important place in addition). 6.1. An expansion of needs so understood is implied in the expectation, just touched on, that subsistence will be conceived more amply, under changed conventions. 6.2. But the expansion of needs in the restrictive sense will go much

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 25 further: It will go hand in hand with the expectation that labor will become 'the prime necessity of life'29; and reach as far as Marx's declaration carries that the richness of future human development will be 'a richness of needs.'30 Neither of these points can be understood taking 'needs' solely in the sense of desire needs. One has to project onto the topic of work or labor the ineluctability of the narrow sense of needs. 6.2.1. No doubt one may infer that in speaking of labor as 'the prime necessity of life' Marx would have thought it quite anomalous that when it had become so anyone would have failed to feel a strong desire for labor. Yet the language itself is the language of primary needs, not desire needs. Moreover, the expectation expressed in that language is founded on a lawlike connection made between having a normal quantity of interesting work and becoming a fully-developed - self-realized - human being. It is a lawlike connection typical of primary needs. Without food, human beings perish. Without labor, they falter in development; and in functioning, once development has proceeded that far.31 6.2.2. On the richness of human development, Marx says in a striking passage: 'To take the place of wealth and poverty as political economy knows it, there comes forward the rich man, fitted out with rich human exigencies. The rich man is at the same time the man who, to live, has need of a totality of human manifestations, the man for whom his own realization is an interior necessity, a need.'32 6.2.2.1. The force of this passage radically diminishes if we substitute the language of having a desire or even having a strong desire for the language of needs. 6.2.2.2. Moreover, the language of the passage, on the face of it, strongly resists such substitution: The 'exigencies' have to be met 'to live'; and self-realization has become an 'interior necessity' (which is not a term that Marx uses in speaking of desire needs). Marx evidently means to reinforce this assertion by adding, 'a need.' Only the restrictive sense will supply such reinforcement; only in the restrictive sense is a need ineluctable and meeting it a condition of functioning without derangement in personality and character. 6.2.2.3. It might be said that here as elsewhere one could have an ineluctable need without being aware of it, or fail to be compelled by it even if one is aware. The reference to 'interior necessity' may be taken to put these considerations to rest in this case. Even if it did not, and one accepts the paradoxical possibility that 'the rich man, rich in needs' might be either unaware of them or uncompelled by them, they would

26 Moral Objectives still be ineluctable in that without satisfying them he would not be able to 'realize' himself, or even to live. 6.3. Does this far-reaching change in needs, including needs in the restrictive sense, imply a change in human nature? 6.3.1. Additions to the received list of primary needs might be accepted without this implication. Functioning with normal health and alertness as a citizen and worker may require in the successor society that people have interesting work. Without such work, they become depressed and listless, as people in earlier generations, used to toil and hardship, would not have. On this view, the test for normal functioning would not change. 6.3.2. Alternatively, the need for interesting work, along with the need for scientific pursuits and artistic expression and activity, might be taken to bring in its train a change in the concept of functioning. We now count, as we did not before, mild depression, even boredom, as evidence against normal functioning. 6.3.3. In either case, the change in respect to functioning can be accommodated while maintaining that human nature has not changed. What has happened is that certain capacities and potentialities always present in human beings have become actualized. Human beings were always potentially liable to suffer from the denial of interesting work; they were always potentially, given certain developments, delicate and sensitive to a degree that made their normal functioning dependent on having interesting work and expressive opportunities. Or, we might say, they were always ready, given certain developments, to invite (and adopt) a more sensitive test for normal functioning; and it would be reasonable to do so, once former hardships had been transcended. 6.3.4. If we incorporate these potentialities into human nature only after the event, we approach trivializing the issue about there having been a change in human nature, though we could still make a move to dispose of the contention that human nature itself was going to change radically: The contention, we could say, would have ignored a trivial truth. If, however, we specify the potentialities beforehand (as Marx does), human nature, determined and determinable in just that way, furnishes a basis for comparing capitalism and socialism. Given the qualification that only the potentialities unfolding in one direction of development are valued, it is a concept rich in content and heavy in normative freight. 6.3.5. This, rather than treating human nature as plastic without limit, seems to be the best way of connecting with needs what Marx says

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 27 under the head of 'species-being' about the distinctive human power to shape the life of the species.33 As Marx never explicitly denies, the needs for food, shelter, clothing, companionship, social training, and so forth will still be present, though now never occasions for anxiety. In 'the objectification of species life' human beings, under the arrangements of the successor society, will at once submit all aspects of life to their own purposes and actualize in an optimal way with optimal variety their potentialities.34 6.3.6. This position is, of course, entirely consistent with denouncing as false what is said under capitalism about human beings having by nature an egoistic outlook or 'a propensity to truck and barter.' What Marx intended to do, in respect to needs as in respect to other matters, was to correct the mistakes of bourgeois ideology about human nature. Human nature as it is understood - misunderstood - under capitalism will give way to human nature correctly understood and optimally realized.35 Notes 1 References to Marx's writings will primarily have in view the Pleiade edition of his Oeuvres, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965-82), signaled by the abbreviation OP, followed by volume number and page number(s). In a note of 1875 prefacing the first edition of the French translation of Das Kapital, a translation that appears again in OP, Marx says that he has not only supervised the translation, but revised the text as the translation proceeded, and so, he says, the translation 'possede une valeur scientifique independante de 1'original [the second edition in German] et doit etre consultee meme par les lecteurs familiers avec la langue allemande.' For the convenience of readers, I also give corresponding citations in English translations, though they sometimes do not give as explicit support to my argument as the texts in French, and some passages have even dropped out in the passage from the 2nd German edition through the French edition to the posthumous 3rd and 4th German editions. (Given the passages that remain, the dropping out does not seem to signify any change in Marx's views about needs.) Capital, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, 2 vols. with continuous pagination (London: Everyman's, 1930), is abbreviated C; Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), is abbreviated G; Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), cited for the Excerpt Notes of 1844, which in OP but not in the English translations of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are classed with the latter,

28 Moral Objectives is abbreviated W, while the latter (in the translation by Martin Milligan, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in Moscow and in London by Lawrence and Wishart, 1959) is abbreviated EPM; The Poverty of Philosophy in the anonymous English translation published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow and in London by Lawrence and Wishart, 1956, is abbreviated PP; Critique of the Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1938), is abbreviated CGP; The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947) is abbreviated GI. 2 Vernon Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View (New York: Knopf, 1945); Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 61ff; Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (New York: St Martin's Press, 1976). 3 For the most vigorous instance of denial on Althusser's part, I must refer to his vehement discourse with me when I visited him in 1978 in his rooms at the Ecole Normale; but what he had in mind can probably be gathered from his stress, in Lire le Capital, vol. II (Paris: Maspero, 1968), 32-4, on the overwhelming importance in Marx's theory of structural considerations (in particular, the difference made in the structure of production, with far-reaching consequences for the character of consumption, by the distinction between constant and variable capital and the distinction between the capital goods and the consumption goods sectors of production). In respect to the character of needs, 'cette conception refuse done a 1'anthropologie classique son role fondateur de 1'economique.' Needs 'sont soumis & une double determination structural, et non plus anthropologique' (Althusser's emphasis). 4 OP I: 219 (Wage Labor and Capital); OP I: 245 (General Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy); OP I: 277 (Critique of Political Economy), where Marx refers to the 'objet de besoins humains/ whether 'necessaires, utiles ou agreables'; OP I: 300 (CPE); OP I: 501 (Wages, Prices and Surplus Value); and then (all from the first volume of Capital), OP I: 561-2,569,605, 612,621,650,675,697,739 (C: 3,10,44,50,61,88,114,136,181-2). See also OP II: 25,30 (W: 273, 277), 49, 95, 111 (all from the Paris mss. of 1844) (EPM: 57, 120,90); and OP II: 225,241 (G, 171,263). 5 OP I: 72 'les vivres necessaires a la sustenation de 1'ouvrier' (PP: 114]; OP I: 121, 'le besoin de la population' (for food) (PP: 177); OP 1:168 (Communist Manifesto), 'les vivres dont [the worker] a besoin pour son entretien et pour perpetuer sa race'; OP I: 204 (Wage Labor and Capital), 'les moyens necessaires a son existence); OP 1:228,229 (Wage Labor and Capital); OP 1:460 (Inaugural Address); OP 1:483 (Wages, Price and Profit); OP I: 521, 522 (Wages, Price and Profit), 'objets de premiere necessite' which determine the

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 29 value of labor power, 'denrees necesaires'; OP I: 524 (Wages, Price and Profit), 'les necessites phyiques'; OP I: 528 (Wages, Price and Profit), 'les moyens de subsistence indispensables pour vivre et se multiplier'; and - all from the first volume of Capital - OP I: 562n (citing Locke distinguishing between 'besoins' and 'convenances'), 698,717, 719,720,722 (where the price of labor power is said to be at its minimum when it equals the value of the 'moyens de subsistance physiologiquement indispensables'), 828, 844 ('besoins de premiere necessite' [for] Tentretien de ... vie'), 850 ('subsistances qu'il lui faut pour son entretien ... quotidien'), 853 ('chemises' as objects 'de premiere necessite'), 857n, 931 ('L'homme a besoin d'un poumon pour respirer'), 959-61 ('les conditions vitales de 1'ouvrier'), 975 (where a contrast is drawn between 'marchandises de premiere necessite' and 'les nouveaux besoins de luxe'), 1004,1005 ('besoins naturels qu'il est indispensable de satisfaire'), 1007 ('premiers besoins'), 1015,1085,1097-9,1108-9 ('consummation la plus indispensable,' 'consommation necessaire') (C: 4n, 137n, 156,158, 158-9,161, 318, 326,329,409,456,477,555,556,558-9 - abbreviated in comparison with the French text, 567,639, 663 - abbreviated). See also OP II: 29, 33 (Paris mss.), 'la joie de ... fournir au besoin d'un autre 1'objet de sa necessite' (W: 277, 281); OP II: 62-4, 85 (Paris mss.), 'prisonnier du besoin elementaire' (EPM: 74-5,108); OP II: 86-7,130 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 110,157); OP II: 244,246-7n (G: 294, 852-3). 6 OP I: 217 (Wage Labor and Capital). Other passages that may be classed with this one include OP 1:19, 36 (both in PP: 45,68); OP 1:165 (Communist Manifesto); OP I: 247, 'En tant que necessite et besoin, la consommation est ellememe un facteur interne de 1'activite productive' (G: 94); OP I: 645 (C: 84); OP II: 27 (W: 275), 102 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 129); and, in the Grundrisse, OP II: 242, 258-9, 301 (G: 305n, 408, 700). 7 OP I: 846 (C: 320). Cf. also in Capital, OP 1:1001,1059 (C: suppressed around 551, 611); and in the Paris mss., OP II: 29 (W: 277). 8 OP II: 98-9 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 124). With this passage I would also class another from the Paris mss., OP II: 78 (EPM: 101). 9 See, for example, OP I: 722,1119 (both in Capital) (C: 161, suppressed around 672-3). 10 OP I: 720,853 (C: 158-9,329). Cf. OP 1:245 (G: 92); OP I: 528 (Wages, Price and Profit). 11 OP I: 799-800,806 (C: 268-9,274). 12 OP I: 722,1019-20 (C: 161,571-2). 13 Introducing on these points and others precisions that Marx left for others, John E. Roemer, in Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), offers a basic model in which 'the

30 Moral Objectives only workers who get reproduced are those who are employed' (22; cf. 38). If the wage rate falls below subsistence, workers withdraw from the economy and 'engage in handicraft production, or some such alternative' (23). Later, Roemer offers a more complicated and more realistic model in which 'the government... sets a tax rate on profits that is just sufficient to provide goods in some subsistence amount to the unemployed' (182-3). 14 See, for example, OP 1:173 (Communist Manifesto), 'La bourgeoisie... ne peut plus assurer 1'existence de 1'esclave a 1'interieur meme de son esclavage.' 15 OP 1:1426 (CGP: 15). 16 OP II: 44,61, 85 (all in Paris mss.) (EPM: 28, 73,108). 17 OP II: 92-3 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 117). 18 OP I: 991 (C: 526). 19 OP II: 253-4 (G: 540-2). 20 OP II: 61, 91-3 (both in Paris mss.) (EPM: 73,117). 21 OP II: 29 (W: 278). After the abolition of private property, 'le besoin et la jouissance perdent leur nature egoi'ste.' (OP II: 83 (EPM: 107)). 22 OP II: 91-2 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 115), a passage quoted in this connection by Duncan. 23 OP II: 84-6 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 108-9); OP II: 258-9 (G: 259). 24 OP I: 913-61 (C: 391-447); OP II: 297-300,305-6, 310-11 (all in G: 692-5, 7046, 711-12). 25 OP III: 1065 (German Ideology) (GI: 22); OP II: 81 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 104); OP II: 306 (G: 706). 26 The Basic Writings of Trotsky, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 203-4 (in an excerpt from The Revolution Betrayed). 27 Cf. OP III: 1066 (GI: 24). 28 See 3.1.1 above and references there. 29 OP I: 420 (CGP: 10). 30 OP II: 88 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 111-12). Cf. OP II: 259 (G: 409), on the advance toward this richness of needs that occurs even under capitalism. 31 OP II: 289 (G: 611-12). 32 OP II: 88 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 111-12) (my translation from the French text). 33 'Species-being' comes out in French as Tetre generique.' 'Gattungswesen' sustains this translation perfectly well, as it would 'generic being' in English, since the German term Gattung (not a precise scientific one) can mean either 'genus' or 'species.' The Langenscheidt German-English/English-German dictionary seems to give the nod to 'genus.' 34 OP II: 64 (Paris mss.) (EPM: 76). Cf. 84 (EPM: 108). 35 I thought this paper was ready to be sent off when I offered to read it in June 1991 to fill a rare gap in the schedule of the weekly colloquium of the depart-

Two Conceptions of Needs in Marx's Writings 31 ment of philosophy at Dalhousie. In the event, the friends and colleagues taking part in the colloquium reacted with a wonderfully rich variety of comments, which I have gratefully taken into account throughout the paper. I am also indebted to Tania Li, a Dalhousie colleague in anthropology, for a useful comment about support of kith and kin as a factor in making the wage rate indeterminate.

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BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY

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3

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation

Marx was more confident than his reasoning gave him any right to be that the society to succeed capitalism would be a free one, and he did not understand that special political techniques would be required to protect freedom, even in an economy of abundance from which private property in the means of production had disappeared. But his expectation that post-revolutionary society would enlarge human freedom and dignity was not an idle one. It was supported by a highly developed (though far from perfect) line of reasoning that was confused, obscure, and inconclusive, and nevertheless deserves our respect and attention. This line of reasoning explains what benefits Marx expected from abolishing the division of labour (an idea otherwise apparently silly) and from substituting planned economic organization for the competitive market. It also exhibits the attractions of a social ideal - dignity and purposefulness in work - that has not usually been treated prominently or independently by English-speaking philosophers. The key to this reasoning is the concept of alienation. I

Marx used the concept of alienation explicitly only in his early writings,1 and treated it most fully in writings that were not published in his lifetime. Its influence in his mature thought can easily be seen, however, in the famous passage on 'the fetishism of commodities' in the first chapter of Das Kapital; in the later chapters on 'the labour process' and the diviReprinted from Social Research, 25 (Autumn 1958), 325-^5. Copyright © 1958 Social Research. Reprinted by permission of Social Research.

36 Moral Objectives sion of labour; and in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Taking these passages, early and late, together, and disregarding metaphysical subtleties, a plain version of Marx's doctrine of alienation may be set forth as follows: In capitalistic society the typical situation of the worker is one in which he must perform tiresome labour on objects that he will not himself use or own. They will instead be claimed by his employer when they are finished, and he in turn will attempt to sell them in the market, without prescribing, any more than the worker prescribes, anything regarding their ultimate destination and use. From the worker's point of view (and to a degree, though a lesser degree, the employer's as well), the objects so manufactured are produced without a purpose; the only reason the worker does the work at all is to acquire enough in wages to buy outside the factory the necessities of life. Thus the worker is alienated from the objects he produces, since they are appropriated by others and used for other people's purposes, not his own; and from his work, since he has no genuine personal interest in it. He is also alienated from his fellowmen: from his employer and other capitalists, because they have privileges that he is denied; from other workers, because he must compete with them for jobs; from both these groups, because he is prevented, under the conditions of the market, from joining with them in expressing a social purpose in production, by bringing it all under a general plan, which the members of society would collaborate in developing and carrying out. In discussing 'alienation' Marx used two words, Entaeusserung and Entfremdung. It seems to be customary for writers in English to note this fact and proceed to talk about 'alienation' or 'estrangement' without bothering very much about the distinction. This practice is, I think, both convenient and justified. Marx himself seems to use the words as a pair, as if he were doubling the concept for rhetorical emphasis only. The essay on 'Die entfremdete Arbeit' is full of expressions like this: 'Wir haben die Entfremdung der Arbeit, ihre Entaeusserung als ein Faktum angenommen und dieses Faktum analysiert. Wie, fragen wir nun, kommt der Mensch dazu, seine Arbeit zu entaeussern, zu entfremden?' (93). It even seems doubtful whether Acton's remark2 that Entfremdung is the 'stronger' word is wholly justified by Marx's usage, although one could construct a plausible distinction between being merely 'alienated' (Entaeusserung) from a product that was not itself of an alarming kind and being 'estranged' (Entfremdung) from one that, like a piece of labour-saving machinery, constituted a threat to the maker's livelihood;

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 37 in that case 'estrangement' would not be a perfectly suitable translation for Entfremdung. We can perhaps escape any problem about distinguishing two concepts by treating Entaeusserung as a necessary condition of Entfremdung; then anything that could be said to eliminate or mitigate 'alienation' could also be said to eliminate or mitigate 'estrangement.' It is in this light that I shall here discuss alienation. If we were more concerned with metaphysics, or with Marx's affinities with Hegel, we might have to proceed differently, though it is interesting in this connection to note that Hyppolite, in an essay that is concerned with both of these matters, treats only of Valienation, and does not divide the concept into two.3 Before considering more fully the meaning of 'alienation' it is desirable to investigate briefly the concept of purpose, which, as has been shown, is a crucial aspect of it. The intimate connection of the concept of purpose with the concept of alienation may be demonstrated directly by citing such assertions as that 'Labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human' is of a kind in which the labourer 'realises a purpose of his own' (Capital, Modern Library Edition, 198); or it may be demonstrated indirectly by reference to Marx's repeated insistence that planning is a cure for alienation. The question 'What was his purpose?' arises about some action X which, though by the presuppositions of the question it is done intentionally (if it is done at all), is not, by the same presuppositions, itself his purpose. A man digs up his lawn. 'What was his purpose?' To find the pipe leading to the well; to start a vegetable garden; to get some exercise. To say that it was his purpose to do Y, any of these things, is to imply that there was something X, digging up the lawn, which he intended to do (whether or not he actually succeeded in doing it), and which he believed would lead to (or be accompanied by) Y. We can say of Y too that 'He intended to do it/ but this does not imply, as saying that it was his purpose to do Y does imply, that some other action or train of actions can be cited which he did or tried to do because he believed they would lead to Y. How do we show that his purpose, in doing X, was to do Y? Most directly, by showing that he says as much: 'I dug up the lawn to start a vegetable garden/ Unless there are grounds for suspecting deception, this suffices. Indirectly, we may offer evidence that he enjoys gardening or needs vegetables, and that he believes digging is preliminary to planting seed and planting preliminary to gathering a crop; or, in general, that he desires Y, and believes X is a causal condition of Y.

38 Moral Objectives He does not have to be able to explain any of these things himself. The famous chimpanzee who moved a box to get at the bananas was acting with a purpose; but he could not have explained what he was doing. The meaning of 'purpose' in the expression 'His purpose, in doing X, was to do Y' may reasonably be taken as general enough to cover both the purposes of men and the purposes of animals. If we conclude from this that men may have purposes without being able to explain them, just as animals may (and do), it is an easy move to making a direct allowance for 'unconscious' purposes - though it is a move apart, for we have no occasion for calling animals' purposes 'unconscious.' On the other hand, to say 'He did it without thinking' is one way of contradicting 'He did it on purpose/4 and with this in mind we may prefer to insist that though both men and animals have purposes, the criteria for having them differ, and that therefore we expect adult human beings of normal intelligence to be able to explain what their purposes are, if they have any. We need not try to settle this issue here; I propose to treat only purposes that we might reasonably expect would be cited by the men who have them, if they were asked. Let us also consider the expression 'He has a sense of purpose in doing X.' An appropriate occasion for saying this is in indicating surprise about a person's attitude toward a relatively protracted activity, like schoolwork, or housework, or a steady job of an unexciting kind, anything that is likely to degenerate into an uncomfortable routine though we may also use the expression to indicate surprise about a person's attitude toward an activity that is not protracted, as in saying 'It is only casual labour, but he has a sense of purpose in doing it/ It is ordinarily taken for granted that sustained voluntary activities (like serving on the local Board of Education) and exciting jobs that are accompanied by public acclaim communicate a sense of purpose. Evidence of 'a sense of purpose' or of 'a strong sense of purpose' in a job of any sort consists in things like obvious attention to the benefits sought for in the activity; spontaneous communication about the benefits, the obstacles to achieving them, and the efficacy of the methods adopted for reaching them; diligence and punctuality in performing assigned tasks, and promptness in taking on further chores, if there is no one else to perform them; spontaneous attempts to recruit further helpers, and to train replacements, if one must relinquish the work oneself. It is noteworthy that the benefits aimed at would be such as to be shared with others, if they were not exclusively designed for them. We would not, I think,

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 39 speak of a man having a strong sense of purpose if his only motive was self-aggrandizement, unless we were making a sardonic joke. I now proceed to define a distinction between 'intrinsic' and extrinsic' purposes. Consider an activity X, carried on with the predictable consequence of doing Y, and assume that Y consists in producing a certain object (or service) O, for a certain use U - for example, a pipe O that will carry water from the well to the cellar of a certain house. Now we shall say that a man N has an intrinsic purpose in doing X if and only if N knows what the Y is that doing X can be expected to lead to, which means that he must know what both O and U will be, and N desires the existence of O and U, which means that if he were offered equally agreeable work at the same pay and informed that it would exclude doing Y (though he was told nothing else about it), he would still choose to do X. In constructing an actual test of intrinsic purpose, 'equally agreeable' would have to be defined in such a way as to rule out, so far as this is possible, N's having any incentive for continuing to choose X other than the fact that doing X leads to Y; for example, the possibility would have to be excluded that N continues to choose doing X merely because he is used to doing it, and loath to try doing anything unfamiliar. The reason for not allowing N more information about the test alternative is that we thereby avoid confronting the problem of ranking purposes. To say, on the basis of our definition, that N has an intrinsic purpose in doing X does not exclude the possibility that he also has an intrinsic purpose in doing other things - things that in fact he may or may not be now doing. We shall say that N has an extrinsic purpose in doing X if and only if two conditions are met: if, in doing it, (a) he has no intrinsic purpose, yet (b) some purpose can be cited in the description of which there is no implication of doing Y, or of X being a stage in some technical process. Thus we exclude not only the statement 'His purpose in doing X is to do Y' but also statements like 'He is rubbing the bearing with a cloth in order to polish it' or 'He is polishing it so that it can be installed by the wheel-assembly department.' Examples of purposes that can be cited within the meaning of (b) are gaining a livelihood, getting extra pay, escaping punishment, having the company of one's friends. The statements 'N has an intrinsic purpose' and 'N has an extrinsic purpose' are contraries; both cannot be true, though both may be false. Saying that N has an intrinsic purpose in doing X does not, however, prejudice our being able to say, in ordinary language, 'N has (besides) another purpose in doing X' - for example, gaining money.

40 Moral Objectives II

We are now in a position to explicate some leading empirical features of Marx's doctrine of alienation. In accordance with the synoptic paraphrase of that doctrine given above, it may be asserted that there are three conditions under any one of which, according to Marx, a worker N is alienated from his work X: first, if he does not have an intrinsic purpose in doing X, whether this is because he does not know what the Y is that doing X can be expected to lead to, or because he has only an extrinsic purpose in doing X; second, if he does not have a sense of purpose in doing X; or, third, if the Y in question is produced for exchange without prior arrangement between N and the buyer, and there was no opportunity in the course of developing a common plan in which he and all other productive members of society had a voice, to consider whether there were not socially more useful alternatives to N's doing X. If this third condition is fulfilled, it may be said that N is in addition alienated from other men - a statement that can be made also if he regards the other men as hostile rivals competing with him for the necessities of life. We shall need a short way of referring to the absence of both the first and the second conditions for alienation from work, and thus when neither of them is fulfilled we shall say, 'N has a purposeful commitment in doing X.' Economic planning of the sort alluded to in stating the third condition will be called 'participant planning.' The first thing to do now is to show that these various conditions for alienation are logically independent of one another, and might plausibly be so even in fact. After this is done, we shall examine Marx's two principal remedies for alienation. The three conditions for alienation from work are connected causally, but not logically. I think that Marx not only failed to appreciate this distinction but even failed to make himself clear enough about the elements of his doctrine to come within sight of the distinction. As for the first two conditions, it is easy to think that if N does not have an intrinsic purpose in doing X, he will not have a sense of purpose in doing it; and, indeed, his not having the one is evidence of his not having the other. But not conclusive evidence, for he may have a sense of purpose without possessing the information that having an intrinsic purpose would involve: suppose, for example, that he is fulfilling the orders of a trusted leader, or working on a secret project that he believes, without knowing very much about it, will be of great benefit to his country. And on the other hand, N may have an intrinsic purpose with-

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 41 out having a sense of purpose. If the work is very tiresome he may simply be unable to maintain the state of feeling required by the latter concept, though he may still go through the motions, and because of intellectual conviction choose to do X rather than other things. A man can, of course, find his work very disagreeable, even frightening, and still have a strong sense of purpose in doing it; but we would not allow that a sense of purpose admits of his being apathetic, or bored. The third condition has a special significance, because it is a criterion of alienation from other men as well as a criterion of alienation from work; and Marx seems to have supposed that all three conditions would hold if the third held. Before disputing this supposition it should be emphasized that the third condition does not even entail the alternative criterion mentioned for alienation from other men, the existence of hostile rivalry. Nor is such rivalry an essential aspect of a market economy. The rivalry of capitalists for markets has not prevented them from being friends of one another, even when they are engaged in the same business; and Marx himself, though he believed that workers are rivals for one another's jobs, believed also that their common proletarian condition engenders a feeling of solidarity among them; finally, there are surely many instances of amiable relations between employers and employees, even under competitive market conditions. In short, activity in a market economy need not be accompanied by hostility and strife. It need not even entail selfish behaviour, for it is a mistake to infer from the fact that the participants in a market transaction are not seeking the same good that each is seeking selfishly to aggrandize himself at the expense of the others.5 There are perhaps causal grounds for thinking that participant planning would induce purposeful commitments in the participant planners. Yet N could participate in planning (cast a vote, say, or a series of votes), accept the work assigned him by the plan that was agreed on, and still do the work without a purposeful commitment to it. This is a point that I shall enlarge on later, in the last section of this essay. On the other hand, N could have both an intrinsic purpose and a sense of purpose in doing X, even if the market has not been superseded by planning. This is a point that I shall elaborate here. It is easy to think that production under market conditions would preclude N from having the information involved in having an intrinsic purpose, while production under participant planning would not. It is also easy to think that a man could not be said to have a purpose Y in doing X unless he had participated (beyond consenting to do X, which

42 Moral Objectives he does even under capitalism) in the decision to produce Y. Marx may have thought both these things. Both are mistaken. (I leave out of account the further possibility that Marx may have thought that if a worker will not himself use or own the things he is making, he cannot have an intrinsic purpose in making them; this possibility is given some colour by the texts, and perhaps obscurely motivated Marx's animus against exchange and the division of labour, but the idea conflicts with any sensible interpretation of Marx's demand that the division of labour be abolished.) Consider the ways in which N may fail to have sufficient information to justify our saying that he has an intrinsic purpose in doing X. In the first place, he may be occupied in making (or adjusting) a part of something and simply not know, or even believe himself capable of guessing, what the whole finished product will be. Or, second, he may know what the finished product will be, in the sense of being able to identify it among products of various sorts, and yet not understand what use it has. Finally, he may know what use or uses there are for the finished product, but not know why further products of this kind are required where they are going to be used, who will use them, or what particular purpose they will serve. The first two sorts of deficiency can be remedied as well under capitalism as under participant planning. Since Marx's time employers have often found it worth their while to remedy them, in orientation and training programs. There may, of course, be a problem about the workers understanding the information that is presented to them. However earnestly an employer in the electrical industry may strive to inform his work force about a complex electronic device they are making, many of the workers may fail to understand the nature of the device - beyond, perhaps, being able to name it and describe its general shape. But this is a difficulty that would be encountered under participant planning too. Once it was decided how far it was desirable to remedy the third sort of deficiency, it would prove equally possible to remedy this, too, under market conditions as well as under participant planning. Unique objects - a dam, the telescope for a new observatory, a church organ raise no difficulty in either system. Reduplicated objects could be treated as unique ones if it were worth the trouble. One can imagine a system in which individual packages of breakfast cereal were numbered, and produced only on order from specific consumers - a system that generalized custom manufacturing on a bespoke' basis. The bespoke' basis is even now one of the normal methods of capitalistic

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 43 production, and it could be generalized without affecting profit-taking arrangements or the institution of private property. Even in a socialist economy, however, people would surely want to make considerable use of the alternative arrangement, which, one supposes, Marx identified in his mind with capitalism.6 That is the one under which goods are produced before they have been sold to consumers, for well understood general purposes but without anyone knowing the final destination of any given object until it has been sold at retail. The other mistake about the third condition of alienation consists in failing to recall that people may come to desire to produce things even if they have not been consulted when it was decided to produce them. Taking a job because of the money, N may later discover the social benefits associated with the products of his factory. Suppose the factory makes fire extinguishers: he may be converted from having an extrinsic purpose to having an intrinsic purpose in doing his part to make them, and may acquire a sense of purpose as well. Indeed, men make great efforts to convert themselves. They seek to rationalize their line of work in such a way that they can develop a purposeful commitment in following it. Certainly it is very common for people to persuade themselves, once they find themselves doing X, that doing X is of great social importance; insofar as they succeed, it is very likely that they will overcome both of the first two conditions of alienation. How many succeed is an empirical question. It is harder, no doubt, for people bottling nail polish than for utility-company linemen coping with community emergencies; but even under capitalism there are plenty of examples of succeeding. I have been trying to show that in his doctrine of alienation Marx confronts us with certain empirical propositions. He holds that under capitalism men are alienated from their work in at least the three ways, and from other men in at least the two ways specified above. He also declares that alienation would vanish if, after private property in the means of production was abolished the division of labour was ended and participant planning was substituted for the arrangements of the market. The foregoing analyses of the different criteria for alienation have perhaps opened up some room for doubting whether these remedies are necessary. It will be worth while to go on to see what doubts can be raised about their being efficacious. What I propose to do in this connection falls far short of settling the question of efficacy. I shall not try to marshal the information that economic and sociological research has acquired on points relevant to the

44 Moral Objectives subject, but shall be concerned merely with indicating what the relevant points are. I propose to give a conspectus of the main topics involved in the question of efficacy, and my reason for doing this is that it will enable me to develop and explicate more of Marx's meaning. There is more than a historical interest in finding out what he meant, for eliminating alienation, though it is not the only thing in the world that we would wish for, is an attractive social ideal, on which we could expect very general agreement. The individual has an 'infinite right' to find himself 'satisfied in [his] activity and labour.'7 Ill

What does Marx mean when he calls for an end to the division of labour? Not that an end should be put to so dividing up the job of producing a particular object that different men can be assigned to different steps. This could be done, but it would mean either a return to primitive conditions of subsistence farming or herding or hunting - which would make nonsense of Marx's historical thesis that capitalism gets the equipment and techniques ready for the economy of abundance in which communism can be achieved - or, possibly, complete automation in every line of work, including the design of machines and other activities requiring intellectual initiative, which is fantastic. Taking the traditional gloss, 'Work will be divided but men will not/ as a point of departure, we may, I think, interpret Marx as demanding three things: first, that men shall no longer be confined each to a single skill, but every man shall have and exercise many skills; second, that among these multiple skills, every man shall have at least one manual and at least one intellectual skill; third, that every man shall exercise the intellectual skill of economic planning. How will any of these help remedy the problem of alienation? There may be some reluctance to believe that it is possible for an ordinary man to be really proficient at more than one skill, for if he had several, would he not be better at any one of them if he concentrated on that? This is not necessarily so, however. The other skills may provide him with needed recreation and thus improve his manifest aptitude and performance in any given one. In any event, if we established standard tests for proficiency in different skills, a considerable number of men would be found even now who could pass many different tests. There are corporation lawyers who are also skilled in gardening, carpentry, and local historical research; philosophers who, perhaps from necessity

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 45 rather than liking, are expert plumbers and electricians, as well as naturalists of some competence. Asking for multiple skills is not asking for anything impossible. Nor is asking that every man have at least one manual and at least one intellectual skill.8 This too is already largely realized. The point of this further demand lies in Marx's belief that people who do intellectual work and nothing else develop a false consciousness of reality, inventing illusory mental objects that displace in their thinking the real physical objects on which life depends; and that they also develop a false pride, which sanctions the oppression of people who do only manual work. The obstacle to fulfilling either this demand or the former one lies in the unequal capacities of men. Possibly there is no intellectual skill within the mental capacity of some men, and no manual skill within the physical capacity of others; and some men may be so slow to learn that they can become proficient in only one skill of any kind. This is a subject, however, that lends itself to easy exaggeration. Furthermore, some intellectual skills are very humble ones, for example, making inventories or counting customers; and some manual skills are very undemanding physically either in strength or in coordination - for example, weeding a window-box or sorting onions. The effects on efficiency and output of arranging for reasonably frequent exercise of multiple skills might or might not be deleterious. At least, this issue cannot be settled out of hand in favour of the market economy. It may be that skills and natural capacities are so distributed that for every occupation there are one or more men each of whom is more proficient at that occupation than at any other, and for none of whom an equally proficient substitute is available.9 Even so, not all of these men would necessarily be employed in the occupation that they excel in; there are in practice so many imperfections in the market process that we cannot count on their being assigned to their ideal occupation, even if there is sufficient demand to keep them all employed in it. It is possible that under a system of multiple skills, output would always be less than it could have been if everyone had been assigned to work full time at that occupation (among those for which there was a demand for further workers) in which he was most proficient. But the sacrifice, though a continuing one, might not be felt for long. Any temporary reduction in annual output that occurred in changing over to a system of multiple skills might be more than made up by a general rise in productivity, as an effect not only of continued improvements in technology, and increased social investment, but also of the heightened

46 Moral Objectives morale that the system of multiple skills might generate. Furthermore, even if the drop in output was never repaired, men might think themselves compensated for the loss by the effects that ending the division of labour would have on alienation. What would those effects be? We can at least canvass the theoretical possibilities, which is something that Marx too should have done. For many men the increased variety of work would perhaps greatly mitigate the boredom and frustration that they might feel if they were confined to any one job, and thus it would be easier for them to maintain a sense of purpose in any given task. If we suppose that the information conditions for their having an intrinsic purpose are fulfilled, we may perhaps expect some indirect but favourable effects regarding intrinsic purpose as well. Against these favourable effects, however, it must be acknowledged that frequent changes from job to job might reduce the feeling of selfidentification with any one job, and thereby work against developing a purposeful commitment in doing it. Moreover, some intellectual men may not find particularly interesting any of the manual skills in which they can attain proficiency and in which there is a social need for their services; similarly, muscular types of men may not relish performing the intellectual skills to which they can be assigned. A bulldozer operator may be much happier if he escapes having to make grocery inventories; and not every mathematical physicist, one supposes, will rejoice in the opportunity to sort onions. If the system allows men to choose, each for himself, whether he shall exercise multiple skills, or specialize in one, men are, in effect, being permitted to take their chances on alienation, and on whatever psychological malady may arise from doing either brain work or hand work exclusively. This is undesirable, but it may be remedied in part by allowing men to pass freely from periods of specialization to periods of exercising multiple skills, and vice versa. It is not so easy to remedy the difficulty, however, if the specialists, though alienated, feel no inclination to change. And in such circumstances there is a further difficulty. One of the benefits to be expected from ending the division of labour is the reduction of differences, hostility, and misunderstanding of the sort associated with class distinctions - the alienation of men from other men.10 This benefit, which might be considerable, will be lost insofar as men specialize, however happy they may feel themselves in doing so, and however strongly endowed with purposeful commitments. On the other hand, if men are compelled to exercise multiple skills,

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 47 alienation from work may increase; and also alienation from other men, for compelling presupposes compellers. People are not likely to develop a sense of purpose in jobs that bore them; and they will have only an extrinsic purpose in doing them if they do them merely because they are compelled to. Moreover, their distaste for some of their jobs may infect their attitude toward all of them, and prevent them from developing a sense of purpose or an intrinsic purpose in doing any of them. Ending the division of labour may therefore involve a nasty dilemma; and if this is ineptly handled, without a far more detailed knowledge of the sociology of work than Marx commanded, or brought to bear on this problem, the division of labour may end, but alienation may persist, possibly in an aggravated form. But when Marx demands an end to the division of labour he not only envisages men having multiple skills, and each man having at least one intellectual and one manual skill; he also holds, as has been mentioned, that there is one intellectual skill that every man in post-revolutionary society will have and exercise - and that is the skill of economic planning. This provision might be held to forestall the harmful effects that assigning men to multiple skills might otherwise have. For even if a man was rather bored by one of his jobs, still, if he had participated in drawing up the plan under which he was assigned to a certain set of jobs, and if he believed the plan had been adopted under fair procedures, he might feel so much responsibility for its success, and for his part in it, that he would be powerfully stimulated toward developing both a sense of purpose and an intrinsic purpose in doing each of his jobs. So it is to the ways in which participant planning would affect alienation that we now turn. IV

Marx champions planning not only, perhaps not even primarily, because he thinks it will relieve the physical suffering of the masses, but also because he thinks it will eliminate alienation for everyone (including, one supposes, the former capitalists, if they can be rehabilitated). I think that what is to be said about this thesis is that it embodies a plausible and fetching idea,11 but that it either involves a mistake about scale or requires a great deal of invention regarding political techniques, which Marx did not supply. If alienation is interpreted as lack of purpose, and not further specified, it may indeed be argued that in consenting to a given social plan -

48 Moral Objectives something he has no opportunity to do under capitalism - the individual worker signifies that he is making it his own purpose to see that the plan is carried out, and to fulfil his own assignment under it accordingly. But this solution would still leave us with the problem raised by a minority of workers who may have voted against the plan, a problem that is not very effectively dealt with by substituting 'consent to the procedures under which the plan is adopted' for 'consent to the plan/ It is a merely formal solution anyway. From N's having a purpose in the sense of having consented to a plan, nothing follows about his having an intrinsic purpose or a sense of purpose in doing the work (any of the multiple jobs) assigned him.12 There are circumstances, however, in regard to which it is plausible to suggest that participant planning would help to develop purposeful commitments. Consider a society composed of ten men, one of whom owns the means of production and makes all decisions about output without referring to the other nine, who must work for him if they are not to starve. (For Marx, this would be significantly like considering in isolation a small factory run on capitalistic principles.) Let us suppose that the owner and master is not especially benevolent, and that a good part of the social output is designed to supply him with comforts and to enlarge his productive facilities, while the workers, for their part, have urgent needs that go unsatisfied. Now suppose that a revolution occurs in this small society, as a result of which the owner and master is stripped of his property and privileges. All ten men (including the ex-capitalist, after a period of purification) now collaborate in developing a plan for production and distribution, and output is governed accordingly by a schedule of acknowledged community priorities. The men see one another every day, on the job and off. They constantly discuss their common problems as the plan is carried out, rejoicing in one another's successes and commiserating one another's failures, mindful always of the bearing of these things on the community plan. In such circumstances every man of the ten might have a purposeful commitment in doing all the work assigned him. At the very least it seems reasonable to believe that social institutions would have been transformed from a condition extremely unfavourable to developing purposeful commitments to one that was favourable, perhaps extremely so. It is true that in a given case the ten men might be so ill assorted by abilities and temperaments that they could not work together harmoniously, and there might be other empirical difficulties. Nevertheless, the

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 49 idea that participant planning would eliminate (or mitigate) alienation is a plausible one if we take society on a sufficiently small scale. It is not so plausible if we apply it to a large society. Consider a society of ten million13 - less than the population of Great Britain or Germany in Marx's time. Suppose that it is divided into a relatively small class (say one million) of capitalists and their families, and a relatively large proletariat, consisting of the other nine million people. Again, suppose that there is a flagrant disregard of the vital needs of the class without property in the means of production. These are the conditions under which Marx thought capitalism would break down, and under such conditions revolution for the sake of participant planning might well attract the revolutionary ardor of the proletariat. But, afterwards, would participating in planning, along with say four million other adult voters, do much to prevent alienation on the part of individual workers? How much could any individual rank-and-file voter do in the way of planning? This is a question of technique. Can techniques for planning be found that will induce purposeful commitments in rank-and-file participants? Establishing a central planning bureau or nationalizing industries will not produce such results automatically. We need something more than voting in national elections; yet if we ask for anything more, we may be asking for so much of a man's time that many will prefer not to participate. Marx says singularly little about the techniques that would be needed, though something can be made of his approval, in The Civil War in France, of the vision that the Commune had of multiple loci of cooperation and collaboration spread throughout the country. The techniques, in fact, largely remain to be invented.14 The techniques that are available are liable to abuse; in fact, they raise the possibility of inducing purposeful commitments by deception. The actual planning undertaken after a revolution might devolve - and, indeed, very likely would - upon a small group of leaders. To arouse enthusiasm for planning, this elite would not necessarily have to allow much real participation. A show of participation might suffice - elections with one ticket, for example, but with plenty of noble sentiment and noisy hoopla, with block leaders turning out frenzied voters, and an atmosphere of heroic crisis. The illusion of participation, especially if it were accompanied by material rewards, might go a long way toward curing alienation. It would not go far enough to satisfy Marx, however, and that is why it was important to stipulate the third of the conditions making for alienation from work: the absence of an opportunity to raise questions

50 Moral Objectives concerning alternative assignments in the course of genuine participant planning. Alone, this criterion would make the solution of the problem of alienation by participant planning merely formal. Attached to the other criteria, it precludes authoritarian solutions to the problem, and displays the presence in Marx's thinking of democratic values. Planning cannot be considered necessary in order to eliminate alienation solely in the sense of the first two conditions; they may be abolished without planning. Marx would still demand participant planning, because he thinks the dignity of man requires it. Finally, we should not fail to connect Marx's opinion that planning would reduce alienation with his belief that men's attitudes are determined (except in the case of an obsolescent ruling class) by the realities of their role in production. There may be no practicable way of hoodwinking people indefinitely into thinking that they are themselves planning when they really are not; and if deception must fail sooner or later, there are not only general moral reasons for Marx's conviction that democracy should be introduced into economic life but also causal grounds for thinking that participant planning must be genuine to be effective. Note, 1998 Were I to write on the alienation of labour today, I would show myself more sensitive, in the use of pronouns and otherwise, to the fact that women are as much subject to it as men, or more so. I had not learned in 1958 the lessons that began in the 1970s to reach me from feminist philosophers. Would I do more, writing today, than recast the article in a unisex mode? There is nothing that I would have to do to come abreast with the shift of opinion about whether ideas about alienation continued to work in Marx's thought after the early writings on which the article focuses. Subsequently, the term itself has been spotted in the Grundrisse (written 1857-8). Jon Elster, in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), the best comprehensive treatment of Marx's theories ever to appear in English, cites (101) a passage on 'the automatization of the world market.' Elster discusses alienation at length, but not to such effect as to make my treatment by any means superfluous. Indeed, I think that in spite of his acuteness he takes a step backward after introducing (74-5) a distinction between 'objective' alienation (consisting of social relations of which the worker may not be aware) and 'subjective' alienation. The distinction is intelligible, and Elster rightly argues that objective alienation would not suffice to motivate unrest. However, he does not ask himself whether each of the sorts of alienation

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 51 that Marx identifies might not have both objective and subjective aspects; nor does he ask himself whether having in the set just one sort with a subjective aspect might suffice to motivate. I think my treatment is clearer than Elster's, or other later ones about motivation, and more direct in moving from Marx's diagnosis to a critical discussion of the two chief remedies that he offers. (For a discussion of other limitations in Elster's book, good as it is, see chapter 14 below, where it is a subject of a critical notice.)

Notes 1 Specifically, in that section of the first of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts dating from 1844 which in the Gesamtausgabe is entitled 'Die entfremdete Arbeit,' Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, 1932); Part 1, vol. 3, 81-94, and in The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), written in 1846 (New York, 1947) esp. 20-72; also in The Holy Family (1845) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), a work I shall not here make use of. 2 H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch (London: Cohen & West, 1955), 224. 3 Jean Hyppolite, 'Alienation et objectivation/ in Etudes sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1955), 82-104. 4 Both of these expressions belong to the discourse of praise and blame, and they indicate that the concept of purpose, like the concept of motive, is connected as much with prescribing conduct as with describing behaviour. Indeed, perhaps such concepts originate in the first connection - as has been suggested for the concept of motive by John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, 1922), 120-1, and by G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957) 20-3.1 shall not even make a gesture at untangling the descriptive and prescriptive implications of these concepts, though the discussion of having 'a sense of purpose,' which follows, is relevant to the problem. 5 This is very neatly and succinctly argued by W.D. Lamont, in a section of The Value Judgement (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955) that I omitted to mention in an ambivalent review of that book in Philosophical Review, 66 (April 1957), 55-8; I refer to his discussion entitled The Economic Relation and the Idea of Good,' 36-40. 6 For the same impression of Marx's assumptions see M.M. Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 207-8. 7 G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History (Introduction to the Philosophy of History), trans. R.S. Hartman (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 28. 8 I state the demand very conservatively. Fourier, who greatly influenced Marx

52 Moral Objectives

9

10

11

12

on this point, and some of Marx's disciples seem to concur in suggesting that in an ideal society everyone would have many skills of each kind; see Acton (n2), 232-6. One would be inclined to be less conservative if one believed that the skills required in a socialist economy would be simpler, by and large, than the skills required in earlier economies, but this is by no means certain, even though increased mechanization can be expected to simplify many of the needed skills. This is a theoretical possibility suggested by the 'principle of comparative advantage,' one of the elementary tools of economics. A student of mine, Douglas R. Ayer, reminded me of the relevance of this principle during a class discussion of Marxism. [Note, 1998:1 might have drawn more profit from my student's suggestion by applying the principle correctly. I go on in the text to suggest that it is because of imperfections in the market process that people might not be assigned to the occupations in which they excel everyone else. But according to the principle of comparative advantage, even if the market process is operating perfectly, people will not necessarily be assigned to the occupations in which they are most proficient. They will be assigned to the ones in which they make the most contribution - to those in which their marginal revenue product is highest. Thus someone who excels even more in proficiency as a gardener than in proficiency as a surgeon may find it best to specialize in surgery and leave gardening to others. Similar results might come from socialist planning, though it might reckon the optimal contribution to the social product on some other basis than marginal revenue product.] 'The difference between ... a philosopher and a common street porter ... seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to he employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance' (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book I, chap. 2). An idea shared with Hegel (Reason in History, 83): in the modern state the subjective will of the citizen coincides with the will of all. Hegel's formula, in turn, reflects Rousseau's doctrine of the general will, both directly and as transmitted by Kant's teaching on the kingdom of ends. The question might be raised whether, without a labour market, it would be possible to test a man's having an intrinsic purpose. Could he be offered alternative jobs? But socialism need not exclude voluntary choice of occupa-

Diagnosis and Remedy in Marx's Doctrine of Alienation 53 tions and free movement from job to job; and workers could always be interrogated about hypothetical alternatives, though this is not an entirely satisfactory method. Evidence of extreme alienation is provided by flight and emigration; we have evidence of this kind in the case of the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Hungary. 13 Ten million is a big jump from ten. Very likely there would be a gradual change in the degree to which planning helped alleviate alienation, as the size of the society under consideration was gradually increased. On the other hand, there is sociological evidence indicating that even ten may be too many for maximum benefits without special techniques for encouraging participation and developing purposeful commitments. In one recent study of task performance in small groups it turned out that as the groups varied in size from three members to ten, it was increasingly likely that a minority of the members would play specialized roles as leaders, and that formal procedures like voting would be adopted. The larger groups (ten or thereabouts) were more efficient in working out plans, but the members of these groups were more likely than the members of the smaller groups to believe that they had spent too much time 'getting ready' to work rather than working, and that they needed 'better leadership.' Thus there seems to have been a measurable increase in disaffection even within this small range of group sizes. See Morris I. Berkowitz, Group Size and Social Organization, (New Haven: Yale Interaction Laboratory, 1957), 37, 42,45. For calling my attention to Dr Berkowitz's work, I am indebted to Professor Omar K. Moore, under whose direction it was carried out. 14 Abram L. Harris, 'Utopian Elements in Marx's Thought/ Ethics 60 (January 1950), 79-99 (reprinted in Economics and Social Reform by the same author, New York: Harper, 1958), comments on Marx's 'failure to see anything incongruous in an arrangement whereby industry is operated by self-governing workers and at the same time by a "central plan,'" and notes that Marx omitted to consider by what procedures authority would he conferred on the plan (93—4). This is perfectly valid criticism, although Marx is not entirely definite in specifying a central plan. Harris goes too far, however, in discounting the notion of 'worker control' as impracticable, and in dismissing the possibility that it offers any sort of solution to the problem of alienation (98). Granting that probably in any case only a minority could exercise the day-to-day functions of authority and supervision, or would wish to, it should still be possible to invent techniques of planning that could induce purposeful commitments in rank-andfile participants. At least, how can we say that it is not possible, without experimenting? Something like the required techniques exist already in some social groups, for example, in the self-governing faculties of certain universities.

4

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It

i

For a time, I thought I might begin with a paradox: Participating is not the same thing as having and playing a recognized role in a joint human activity; yet demanding to participate is the same thing as demanding such a role to play. Alas! The paradox all too quickly bursts out of bounds and leads to a real contradiction. It is true that when there is a special word for the recognized role (as there is, much more often than not, if the role is an established and familiar one), the existence of that word presents a substantial obstacle to speaking of the role as 'participating.' We might properly hesitate to say that a judge participates in a trial, any more than a bride or a bridegroom participates in a wedding. The word 'participate' seems to be at home with formal ceremonies. Weddings, though formal ceremonies, are perhaps not pompous enough, however, for anyone to be said to 'participate' in them; but even the colloquial approximations to the sense of 'participate' with which I shall mainly be concerned are unsuitable. Neither the priest nor the best man, much less the bride or bridegroom, 'takes part' or 'has a part' in the wedding. 'Takes part' suggests a special initiative, without which an enterprise would have turned out differently. 'Has a part/ which might perhaps do for an usher or a page, grossly understates the case for the bride and bridegroom. The obstacle to speaking of 'participating' is not insuperable, howReprinted from Participation in Politics (Nomos XVI), ed. J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman (New York: Lieber-Atherton, 1975), 56-8. Copyright © 1975 by Lieber-Atherton. Reprinted by permission of Lieber-Atherton.

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 55 ever. There is a generic sense of 'participate' always within reach, which can be called in to get over the obstacle. Suppose we asked what arrangements a certain society (maybe our own) had for dealing with crimes or disputes about property; it would be perfectly in order to go on to ask which members of the society participated in these arrangements and on what terms. The answer might be that a few people participated as judges, appointed for life; many people (though perhaps no blacks and no working-class people) participated for brief periods by serving on juries; other people participated as lawyers, advocates for one side or the other. The demand to participate is often, I think normally, put forward on the generic level. It is met, if it is met, by opening up one or more of the established roles (so that, for example, blacks begin serving on juries, receiving briefs as counsel, obtaining appointments as judges) or by creating new roles (as when, for example, voters begin choosing party candidates in primary elections as well as choosing, at general elections, between the candidates of different parties). Normally, when there is a special word for the recognized role newly obtained, the word displaces 'participate'; thus, once the demand has been met, we no longer readily speak of participating, perhaps because to do so suggests something less than the facts about the roles and their institutionalization. But it is a contradiction, not merely a paradox, to admit that a person has a recognized role which falls under the generic concept of participation and to deny that he participates (though one may deny that he merely participates). To demand to participate is, I repeat, to demand to play a recognized role in a joint human activity. The chief ways of not being recognized appear to be: being defied, with the defiance directed against a wouldbe participant with equal or superior power and evident willingness to use the power; being interdicted, whether by ecclesiastical pronouncement or by statute, as in apartheid laws; and, less formally, being ignored, which has many varieties - not being received, not being allotted time to speak, not being listened to (even to the extent of formal pretense), never being heeded, not being given credit. Recognition itself varies greatly in degree of formality and is accorded in one degree or another to all sorts of roles, ranging from roles recognized only pro ternpore (for example, speaking to a legislative body when one is not a member, not even normally present), through permanent roles without much formal elaboration, some of them very simple roles (like running for exercise with a group of people who run in the park every Sunday),

56 Moral Objectives some of them very complicated and variable (like being a member of the executive committee of a society agitating for prison reform). At the other extreme, there are recognized roles both permanent and very elaborately defined, with many attendant formalities (for example, the role of a judge, especially a judge in one of the higher courts). The recognition in question is always recognition by other participants, understood as such on both sides; I do not mean to treat roles imputed by sociologists, on whatever good grounds in theory or observation, if they are not roles known and recognized as such by the people concerned. Can one participate without playing a recognized role? Certainly one can force one's way into an activity; the present participants may not dare show defiance; their defiance, even if they dare show it, may not succeed. But I think such cases can be treated as cases of forced recognition. Whatever the intruder accomplishes with force, he will not have achieved participation unless he has achieved recognition. He may seize a place in the starting line-up; he may even compel the judges to give him the prize if he comes in first; but he will not have taken part in the race if the other runners ignore him - if they do not, whether cheerfully or under duress, race against him. So he must force them to race against him, and with that, he obtains recognition, however grudgingly granted. Can one play a recognized role without participating? I think not, but it must be granted that a role may be recognized, even invested with formal elaboration, and yet not count for much in the joint human activity in which it figures. A herald, a sergeant-at-arms, the chaplain of the Senate, all have recognized roles, but they are roles which I shall pass over to deal with more substantial participation. One way of making sure that the participation is sufficiently substantial to be worth treating - and worth demanding - is to relate it to the outcome of the joint activity. I now proceed to do so, by saying that at least to begin with I shall be treating only recognized roles that consist of an opportunity for action or a duty, in either case one capable of making a significant difference to the outcome of the joint activity. There is, I expect, little need to explain how it is that people, when they demand to participate in a joint human activity, are often understood to be demanding an opportunity to act in ways capable of making a significant difference to the outcome. Very often the outcome in question is one that is likely to affect the interests of the people who demand to participate: they want to participate in order to protect what is at stake for them in the outcome (lower taxes, an end to conscription, a

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 57 cleaner environment) and in giving this reason they make the motivation behind their demand intelligible. The alternative interpretation, sometimes called for, of a demand to participate as a demand to be given a duty capable of affecting the outcome, may not be so easily countenanced. Can it stand alone? Do people ever demand chances of affecting the outcome through duties assigned them, when they do not regard the duties as opportunities to protect their stake in the outcome? I think they do. Moreover, when this alternative interpretation, relying on the notion of a duty, does stand alone, it can serve to draw attention to another sort of reason for the demand to participate, for when the duty interpretation stands alone it connects with this sort of reason only. (Whereas the opportunity interpretation can stand alone with or without such a connection.) Reasons of this sort relate participation to outcomes, but not by way of supposing that the participation will aim directly at affecting the distribution of rewards embodied in the outcome or associated with it. Imagine a city in which a great project is started up - say, of rebuilding the city center with profits extracted from colonies overseas. It will be by far the greatest thing done in the city during a generation, perhaps during several generations. It will call for a variety of efforts and talents. Not all citizens may demand to take part; some may not wish to. However, might not a citizen quite understandably make such a demand and justifiably object to being left out of all the assignments, whether to skilled work in the quarries or on the center site, or to one of the committees for design and supervision, and object even if no question arose of his being harmed in respect to life or livelihood or freedom? It might be said that he objects because he has a stake (an interest) in leading as significant a life as possible; he will lose a chance to live more significantly if he is excluded from the most significant joint activity in his time and vicinity; he may also lose standing with his fellow citizens. There are genuine rewards to be had in these connections; and, no doubt, 'stake' can be extended to cover the possibility of obtaining them; but only at some risk of obscuring the different relation to the outcome. It is not so much the impact that the outcome will make upon the person making the demand that counts for him on this interpretation, but the impact that he can make upon the outcome, in respect, say, to its physical content or durability or beauty. He wants to be able to say, 'If it had not been for me, one of the horses prancing in the frieze of the Parthenon would have been left out of the design/ or 'put in facing the

58 Moral Objectives other way/ or 'cut from defective stone/ or 'finished less carefully/ He wants, in other words, a genuine, certifiable share of the glory, and to have that share he must beforehand have a share of the responsibility.1 Both a duty to be performed and an opportunity for action are modes of 'participation' in the sense that I am mainly concerned with, the 'taking part' sense. But both also invite the application of 'participate' in quite a different sense - a sense neatly expressed, both in partnership with 'taking part' and in opposition to it, by the verb 'partake.'2 In this sense one participates in a 'get-rich-quick' scheme and its proceeds, in the profits of a firm (if one is a stockholder), in the fruits - and the glory - of victory in the field or triumph in the arts. There is some crudity, a sign perhaps of excessive stress on outcomes, about assimilating 'glory' to 'proceeds.' Besides 'glory/ moreover, we must consider humbler parallels, like the appreciation of one's family and friends for a duty conscientiously performed. Are such rewards to be treated on the same footing as a share of the profits from some possibly ignoble enterprise? But participation in rewards associated with the outcome has already been implied in the reasons for demanding either a duty or an opportunity that will affect the outcome, and I think I can give due honour to the 'partaking' sense of 'participate' without suggesting that the rewards to be participated in appeal only to ignoble motives like greed. Continuing for the time being to treat participation as related to the outcome of a joint human activity, I shall assume that a substantial demand to participate embraces among other things a demand to be given at least a chance of partaking in whatever benefits result from the activity or from sharing in the responsibility for its outcome. I speak of 'a chance of partaking' rather than of 'partaking' to allow for the possibility that the activity may fail or that what one tries to do as a participant may not be accommodated in the outcome.3 A number of theorists have carefully fostered consideration for educative aspects of participation.4 The scheme that I have just outlined can be adjusted so as to make sure of keeping such aspects in view. People can learn through participating in a given activity to identify the benefits which the activity and others of its kind offer, actually or potentially; simultaneously, people advance in understanding how these benefits answer to their own known interests. But they may also advance in defining and articulating interests which they were not previously aware of: interests that they have as individual persons, and, besides, interests that they have as members of groups with common dangers and common opportunities.5 Thus Marx supposed the workers would

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 59 awaken to class consciousness and simultaneously to conceptions of fuller personal lives. My scheme can be stretched to count advances in knowledge in all these respects as rewards associated with the outcomes of current activities. Such rewards are less closely associated with outcomes than glory, to be sure, since they may be substantial when the outcomes are humiliating, even shameful. However, like glory, they could be included in outcomes, if 'outcome' were used in a comprehensive sense, to include all the effects and consequences of a joint activity; and like glory, they are assets that can be carried forward. If they do not lead immediately, for the participants who acquire them, to impacts of the sorts they seek, including on occasion impacts directly upon the distribution of rewards, they may yield success on these points later on. Suppose, however, that a person fails continually in having the impact on outcomes that he aims for, whether his aims are self-interested, or public spirited, or inspired by a thirst for fame; by learning, through participation, to address himself in a larger way to the pursuit of any of these aims, he may yet have learned to lead a larger and richer life. II

People not only demand participation for themselves; they also demand participation by others. I have a hypothesis about this second sort of demand. It is that there are two distinct alternatives to participating and yet that both are condemned over the same range of activities. One of the alternatives to participating is being excluded (the varieties of which I surveyed earlier, in surveying the ways of not being recognized); the other alternative to participating is remaining aloof. Both imply nonparticipation, but they are independent and mutually exclusive conditions. If I do not participate through aloofness, then I am not excluded from participation. If I do not participate because I am excluded, the question of my aloofness does not arise. (Pretending that I do not care about being excluded is not the same thing.) The part about the two alternatives being condemned over the same range of activities is the more controversial part of the hypothesis. There are in fact a variety of counterexamples, and while some of these do not seem to reach the heart of the matter, others have enough force to bring this part of the hypothesis down from speaking categorically to speaking of a strong tendency, which can be found in a number of cultures very different in other ways.

60 Moral Objectives In many cases we might resist any move to take away someone's right to take part in a certain activity, and so oppose his being excluded, when because he was sick or away he was in fact not going to take part; but then his not taking part would not amount to aloofness, and, besides, the question of his not taking part arises in respect to the present stage of the activity while the question of his exclusion relates to stages present and future. It is equally easy to allow for another sort of objection: some activities are multiform, and a person may be supported against being excluded from a multiform activity - a sports program offered by a neighbourhood club, for example - and yet not condemned for standing aside, once he has been admitted, from a given branch of the activity. He may not wish to play tennis or volleyball, and no one may reproach him for passing them up; but in that case it might be supposed there would be some alternative branch of activity in which he would engage: he would play his part in the sports program by, say, joining the swimming team. A distinctly more unsettling objection lies in the possibility of campaigning against the exclusion of certain people in the hope that once they are admitted they will bring the activity to an end.6 For may not one way of bringing it to an end be to pack the group that is supposed to carry it on with people who will remain aloof from it? Imagine a beauty pageant [though this will now (1998) seem, happily, a quaint example], which some people might object to both because it excluded black girls and because it degraded the female sex. Suppose the campaign against exclusion is won; black girls enter in great numbers, but then ostentatiously refuse to cooperate with the proceedings. The same people might applaud their conduct who had condemned their exclusion. I think this example must be met by qualifying the hypothesis: exclusion is condemned by the same people over the same range of activities as aloofness with the possible exception of certain activities which those very people disapprove of. Even with this qualified reformulation, however, the hypothesis looks vulnerable to the most important objection of all: some people do condemn a person's being excluded from participation in politics and yet tolerate, even approve of, his being aloof in many cases, at least to the extent of actually taking very little part. Thus Berelson and others have reconciled themselves to most voters' being apathetic about politics. If these voters were more active they would be more partisan; by being less partisan they exert a moderating influence on the competition between parties and candidates.7 This particular version of the objection

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 61 can be fielded in part by pointing out that in effect these writers are distinguishing between activities; and no one supposes that approving general participation in one activity (voting) implies approving general participation in other activities. Other writers have held, by contrast with Berelson, that it is best for ignorant and apathetic voters not to exercise their admitted right to vote; and this version of the objection can be dealt with by pointing out that the same writers would very likely hold it even better for these voters to learn enough and care enough to exercise their right properly. Again, however, the objection is met only in part; a residue of this version of the objection and of the first appears again in a third version, in which the right to vote is looked upon as a potential recourse that every sane grown person should have, but it is simply denied that everyone with the right has an obligation to exercise it continually. This version of the objection embodies a certain laissez-faire attitude toward political activity, though I do not propose to ascribe it to classical laissez-faire liberals, much less suggest that it is characteristic of them. The attitude is one that both Plato and Aristotle were ready to adopt - Plato, accepting Socrates' inhibitions about taking part in the politics of an imperfect society;8 Aristotle, in unqualified praise for a self-absorbed life of contemplative activity.9 How much weight is to be given to the attitude? The attitude exists, but it is not, I think, prevalent with us. The grounds for condemning aloofness are too strong, and though they are largely distinct from the grounds for condemning exclusion, I expect they suffice, for most people in our culture, to make the condemnation of aloofness go hand in hand almost the whole distance with the condemnation of exclusion. Exclusion is condemned on the same grounds that a person demands to participate: expressed in relation to the outcome of the joint activity, these are, as canvassed earlier, the chance to benefit or to suffer from the impact of the outcome and the desire to share in the achievement. Thus, excluding a person jeopardizes his own well-being; at the very least, he stands to lose something in the way of a chance to lead a life that he regards as significant. There is some linkage with the grounds for condemning aloofness. If we take the educative aspects of participation seriously, we should accept as one ground for condemning aloofness the failure of the person in question to improve himself. Moreover, one ground for condemning exclusion is that it deprives (just as aloofness would) the other people carrying on the activity of the skills and wisdom which the person excluded might bring with him. Yet the grounds for condemning aloofness are weighted, as the grounds for condemning

62 Moral Objectives exclusion are not, on the side of the effects (through the outcome) on other people. The main ground for condemning aloofness is typically that everyone stands to lose if the outcome is diminished by the failure of even one of the people eligible to participate to make his contribution, indeed the best contribution that he is capable of (taking into account his other responsibilities). To make this ground cogent the joint activity is conceived as a common task; it may be a task the success of which hangs by a thread even if everyone works his heart out. At first sight, this conception may not seem to apply very readily to activities that consist chiefly in voting on who shall hold office or on what shall be done with the surplus left at the end of the financial year. Applied to governments, it suits best governments under siege, which claim to be reconstructing the whole of social life - against desperate odds, encircled by hostile powers; but it is just under such governments, of course, that any sign of aloofness is most fiercely condemned. The task conception, however, if not quite so intensely exploited, is almost as potent elsewhere. Americans are brought up within a web of voluntary associations, many of them - for reasons set forth by Downs10 and Olson11 - running with less support from their members than would guarantee their effectiveness or even their survival. Exhortations against aloofness, that is to say, against depriving a group of our contribution to the common task, are as familiar as our daily bread. These exhortations encompass government, which in this connection is still looked upon as something like a voluntary association, not because of any recollection of contractarian ideas, perhaps, but simply with our history of (mainly) voluntary immigration in mind - hence 'America: love it or leave it/ Applied to the tasks of government, the task conception finally succeeds in getting a purchase on voting. The means becomes the end; the task, to keep up the practice of democratic government. According to Downs,12 a conscientious citizen can have rational grounds for not remaining aloof - for voting - in his contribution to this task, even if he does not expect to have a significant effect upon the benefits that he receives from the outcome of any one vote. Whatever Plato and Aristotle came to think afterwards, Athenians too, in the summertime of their democracy, were evidently ready to insist on participation by every citizen. Speaking for them, in an address that also evokes the beauty of their public buildings, like those on the reconstructed Acropolis, Pericles says, 'We differ from other states in regarding the man who holds aloof from public life not as "quiet" but as useless/13

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 63

III I have been treating both demands to participate and demands for the participation of others as relating various persons to the outcomes of joint human activities. But which persons and which activities? Surely it is not sensible to demand of anyone that he participate in every joint human activity; it is hardly more sensible for anyone to demand himself to participate in every activity, or even in all that he fancies of those that he hears of. Can anything useful be said about general principles for matching people with appropriate activities? The general situation, let us say, is one in which a person N demands to participate in a joint activity A of a group G; the activity will have one or more outcomes representable (by propositions describing the state of the world in part) as Pl or P2 or P3 ... or Pn.14 A demand to participate is fully intelligible (as to content) if the person N making the demand, the group G, and the joint activity A are all identified (with the outcome set described in as much detail as necessary to identify the activity). The demand may nonetheless be absurd if the necessary conditions are not met, first, of N's not being so wholly committed to other activities (in the vicinity or elsewhere) as to be unable to be physically present to the extent required for participation; and, second, given our present insistence on keeping always in view activities in relation to outcomes, of N's at least believing that he would (if he participated in A) have some chance of having a significant effect upon outcomes current or future. Putting aside cases in which the demand is raised simply as a distraction or vexation, if either of these conditions failed, the demand to participate could not be assigned an intelligible motivation. We might understand what was being demanded, but we would not understand why the demand was being made. Not all intelligible motivations deserve respect, however, or will obtain a serious hearing for a demand to participate. The demand must not be intrusive. Suppose N is not a member of a group G and has no claim to be a member of the group and no claim to the resources that G is using in A and its other activities. He may nevertheless conceive, quite accurately, that if he participated in A he could shape the outcome in some way profitable to himself. The family next door has bought a boat; if he could take part in making the decisions about using it he could get it several days a month to go fishing. But it would be outrageous presumption for him to demand to participate. What is the principle that rules out intrusive demands? It is not a

64 Moral Objectives principle that depends on the existence of private property in things like boats, or even on the existence of private family households. G is a group of young musicians rehearsing a wind serenade. N, not a member of the group, or anyone with authority over it, would prefer to have them play Treussens Gloria/ his favourite march-tune. N knows that if he were given a chance to take part in deciding what the group would play, he could make himself so obstructive (or so ingratiating) as to persuade them away from the wind serenade. N's demand to participate is still intrusive and will not normally be entertained for that reason. The principle seems to be one that presupposes social provisions sufficient by current standards to guarantee N's opportunities to gain a livelihood; protect himself from serious harm, whether in the way of physical injury or of disgrace or otherwise; and amuse himself in a reasonably full way; and sufficient to cover these opportunities without contemplating that N would be a member of G, which is part of or a consequence of the provisions for other people. These presuppositions are disputable in particular cases, but when they are accepted, N cannot be said to be harmed by being kept out of G (since he is covered otherwise by social provisions); his demand to participate may amount to nothing more than a purely selfish effort to increase his pleasures, an effort with which other people may legitimately refuse to cooperate. Yet there are demands to participate that are not merely efforts at aggrandizing one's pleasures; on the contrary, they represent desperate attempts to protect one's vital interests in the absence (acknowledged on all sides) of sufficient social provisions; they are nevertheless properly not entertained. Consider a mother-in-law observing her son's wife attempting a reconciliation with her son. The mother-in-law may correctly apprehend that if the reconciliation occurs, her son will move away (at the wife's insistence) and neglect her. She may in fact need her son much more than the wife does. She nevertheless does not have the standing necessary to obtain a serious hearing for a demand to participate. The same difficulty besets (in the eyes of stockholders) workers' demands to participate in decisions about the location of a company's factories. If the proposal, heard from time to time, to let only the young men who will have to do the fighting vote upon declarations of war were accepted, the same difficulty would beset the demands of other citizens, who would have some stake in the issue even if the war was not going to be brought home to them.

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 65 In each of these examples, there are two classes of people, defined not by their stakes in the outcomes of the activities in question, but by age or property rights or relations of kinship; and in each of them, the stake of one class is given precedence over the stake of the other, sometimes evidently because as a rule the stake of one class taken as a whole is greater than the stake of the other, but in other cases - in the stockholders' case for obscurer reasons. I suspect that deep questions about justice would have to be gone into before the difficulties raised by these examples could be laid to rest. I shall deal with them here by extending the other provisions principle so that it runs, 'A demand to participate shall be seriously entertained only if there are not provisions other than belonging to G and taking part in A minimally sufficient for N's well-being; or in the absence of such provisions, N belongs to at least one class of people outside G, whose stake in the outcome of A is held to be at least as deserving of attention as the stake of another class of people, that is, those who currently belong to G/ This formula, by begging some of the right questions, points to considerations that are known to be frequently crucial in disputes about demands to participate. There are two exceptions to the operation of the other provisions principle as a necessary condition. One, which might be called the non de trop exception, obtains when N can join G and take part in A without in any way threatening to diminish the benefits of A to those already in G, if it is only by getting in the way or straining the chain of communication. The second arises when N's demand to participate is taken as implying a proposal to improve on existing arrangements; granting that these make minimally sufficient provisions for him, N may claim that by reorganizing G, perhaps taking him in as an additional member, perhaps letting him change places with someone now in the group, he or some other people will be better off and no one will be worse off.15 To accommodate another familiar set of considerations that are frequently crucial in disputes about demands to participate, we may join to the other provisions principle the principle of ability: N's demand to participate in an activity A shall be seriously entertained only if N has at least as much ability to participate as is required for successful participation in some capacity. One can imagine grotesque discrepancies between N's ability and the capabilities required by activity A. N has never studied mathematics and has no native talent for calculation; A is the activity of calculating the size and shape of our galaxy from radioastronomical data. Very often, of course, the discrepancies are hard to make out, espe-

66 Moral Objectives cially when one inquires into them seriously. Management does not rely entirely on the property rights of stockholders as an argument against workers' participation; it invokes conventional assumptions about the activity of management being too intellectual or at least too specialized for workers to carry on competently. Yet these assumptions are at least disputable. Here and elsewhere, in fact, the whole issue of participation is likely to be joined in disputes about ability. So it has been in disputes about the participation of ordinary citizens in effective choices of government policies; so it has been in current disputes about the participation of students in university government. Again, the operation of the principle is complicated by the possibility that what is being demanded is at bottom not participation in A as the activity is now organized, but participation in a reorganized activity, which might allow for different capacities. Then the ability that is held to be a necessary qualification for participation must be defined and reckoned in relation to the reorganized activity. Whether N has the ability will still be a question of fact, which is not best settled by enthusiasm; the answer as to the facts may not favour him, since every form of reorganization that might accommodate him might sacrifice too many other advantages. Even after it has met all the conditions that I have listed, N's demand to participate may still not be accepted, though I think reasonable people will give it a serious hearing, and disputes about N's ability or the sufficiency of other provisions for him will, once started, sometimes end only with a decision to comply with the demand. Whether or not the demand is accepted in the end will depend, sometimes, on peremptory considerations about the legitimacy of the activity or the consistency of N's participation with his (other) duties, sometimes, on meliorative considerations about the consistency of N's participation with more productive rather than less productive assignments of people to groups and of groups to activities. N's demand to participate may deserve consideration but be rejected finally because the outcome for everyone concerned is likely to be better if he does not participate in A but does something else - work, play, or contemplate. It may even turn out that, examined closely in the course of giving N's demand to participate a serious hearing, neither activity A nor group G would figure under better arrangements within reach. N's demand to participate would be rejected, but his making the demand might have as a consequence, surprising to N perhaps, and perhaps gratifying, perhaps not, a social reorganization abolishing both the activity in question and the group.

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 67 IV

Participation has degrees, at least with respect to activities defined in familiar ways: one can take part more or less fully in the sports program or in the campaign for the Senate. A useful notion of minimum provisions for participation can be defined with the help of an analogy with the process of social choice. In that special case, a person N could be said to be permitted to participate provided that he was permitted to express his preference at least for the single outcome which he most favoured and provided that there was at least one possible combination of expressions of preference by other participants such that N's expression of his preference would resolve the choice of outcome in favour of the outcome which he preferred. For example, if all the other participants were indifferent between outcomes, N's preference would prevail; or it would prevail if the others were equally divided pro and con. For the general case the minimum provisions for participation would then be that N would be permitted to act (whether by expressing a preference or a judgment or by actually intervening physically, say, by taking up the chisel himself to cut part of the frieze) so as to affect the outcome at least tentatively and that there would be at least one possible combination of actions by other participants such that N's action would be allowed to stand and would have some part of its intended effect on the outcome. I say 'some part of its intended effect' to allow for the possibility that N, intending to contribute a certain feature to the outcome, might mistakenly expect the other participants to make congruent contributions; as things turn out, N's contribution will not fit in, or add to the beauty and grace of the outcome. In accordance with earlier remarks, I add that the action and the effect must fall within a recognized role associated with the activity in question. Clearly, N may get precious little chance to participate from such minimum provisions. The amount of participation allowed him, under a system of single-ballot simple majority voting, might be reckoned as the reciprocal ( l / v ) of the number of voters.16 Obviously this measure of participation will have a vanishingly small value if the number of voters is very large on the order, say, of the number of voters in Canada, over ten million, to say nothing of the number of voters in the United States. Even then, he may vote on the losing side on any given issue and hence not see his desires or talents reflected in the outcome even to the extent of a share of one ten-millionth, or partake of the benefits in any degree at all. Evidently the most that he can expect is that, win or lose on subse-

68 Moral Objectives quent issues, some of the benefits will be generalized enough for him to partake of them; or that the winning and losing sides will be reasserted sufficiently from time to time for him to be occasionally on the winning side. But even then his impact will be negligible, both in appearance and in reality. The difficulty is just as formidable, apart from voting, in the general case. According to Simmel, modern organizations are incomparably more efficient than those which they have superseded, and have become so by 'the uniform and purposive regulation of every smallest part' - the individual member - *by one single idea and reciprocal determination between each element and every other';17 but they have also become 'too extensive and complex' to allow any of their members more than 'mechanical significance/ poignantly incomplete in personal meaning.18 Not only does the individual member count for very little; very little of the individual member, in purpose and potentiality, is asked for, in subordinating him to the single idea of serving the purposes of the organization. It does not follow that increased provisions for participation ought to be granted him. Perhaps some members could participate more only if others participated less. Perhaps (though this argument generally deserves a skeptical inquiry) increased participation would jeopardize the particular benefits now being produced. It is no wonder, however, that demands for increased provisions for participation are very common, indeed so common that demands formulated otherwise, simply as demands to participate, can often be regarded as demands for increased provisions for participation. Workers may feel that if collective bargaining does not extend to questions about the location of the company's factories they have no participation at all; it does not matter (at least for the moment) that they may have a recognized role in reaching other sorts of decisions by the company, or that they can petition or demonstrate against moving the factory, with some account being taken of their protests. Students were sometimes listened to before they were given seats in university senates, and listened to more systematically afterwards, when they made use of their seats. Some of them have felt, however, that the representation is only token and the participation is less than genuine; so the inclination to demand to participate has recurred. There are a number of ways of increasing the provisions for N's participation. The two basic ways are increasing N's power over the outcome of a given activity A and increasing the number of activities in

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 69 which he has a given amount of power to exercise. But the provisions may also be increased by expanding or otherwise changing the assortment in the outcome set of an activity - the agenda Pa or P2 or P3 ... or Pn; and in a way not simply reducible to increasing the number of activities, by increasing the number of groups to which N belongs. Furthermore, these increases in provisions, like the minimum provisions that may have existed before, can be safeguarded and perpetuated through successive repetitions of the activities in question by formal stipulation of one sort or another, and gaining these safeguards may be counted as a way of increasing participation. It is certainly a frequent and important object of demands to participate. All these ways of increasing provisions may be looked upon as means of increasing N's chances of obtaining outcomes that answer to his needs or desires; and it is perhaps idle to contemplate measuring increases in any of the provisions independently of their connections with such chances. If the outcome is to be determined by a vote, then N's power to determine it increases in a certain sense as the proportion of votes required to carry any one proposal P varies over the range between simple majority to unanimity, for thus N comes ever closer to having the power of veto. Unfortunately, he also may run a greater risk of not obtaining the one outcome that he most wants or needs, and perhaps a substantial risk not only of diminishing the benefits to be expected from the activity but also of there being no outcome at all. The group may even dissolve for failure to decide on one, which may be worse than having the worst of the originally envisaged outcomes.19 The connection with wants or needs is equally impossible to ignore if we consider increasing the number of activities in which N has a certain power. If we count repetitions (tokens) of a certain type of activity separately, there is the difficulty that some of those repetitions - perhaps just one - may be crucial in a person's life and the others too early or too late to make much difference to him. The value of the activities has to be balanced against their number even in this case; obviously it must be so balanced when increases of activities of different types are brought into question. Likewise, additions to the outcome-set which a given group in a given activity may act upon will not please N and his friends very much if they are all trivial additions. A neighbourhood school committee might not consider that the provisions for its participation had increased very much if enlarged in number and variety of outcomes though the agenda might have become, it still did not embrace the possibility of dismissing or transferring teachers. All these sorts of provi-

70 Moral Objectives sions require, each sort within itself as well as all sorts together, at least in the end a comparison and evaluation of combinations: a greater increase in participation and in the provisions for it may be brought about by increasing provisions in fewer ways but more important ones. Increasing the number of groups to which N belongs is no exception to this requirement of economic evaluation, but I would like to single out this sort of provision for a moment's attention in another regard. It does not reduce simply to increasing the number of activities in which N takes part: it has a claim to separate consideration, because holding an activity A and its outcome set constant, the number of subgroups involved may be greater or smaller, as may the number of such subgroups to which N belongs. In other words, under this provision a given activity may be reorganized to allow N multiple opportunities (or duties) of participation, working through as many subgroups. The procedure may be looked upon as a specially intensive version of a technique for increasing participation by 'decentralizing' authority and reducing organizational dependence on hierarchy. The technique is the one used to increase workers' participation in an industrial process by devolving responsibilities for subprocesses upon different 'teams' or 'gangs.'20 In this intensive version, the same worker would belong to more than one such team, and thus might simultaneously have a role to play at the design stage, during assembly, and (say) in testing. Some of the industrial arrangements in Yugoslavia [once attempted, now (1998) sadly abandoned, along with that once-hopeful country] may approximate multiple participation of this kind, and may accord to some degree with Marxist expectations that such participation would help remedy alienation by inducing in workers more adequate conceptions of the overall activity and a well-founded sense of purpose in contributing to it. V

Does it appear by this time that demands to participate raise too many diverse considerations to be manageable? It may seem also that most, maybe all of the considerations can be raised under other, more familiar heads. Is participation a redundant criterion for judging institutions, groups, activities, as well as a polymorphously vague one? The repertory of democratic criteria is already redundant: what people ask for under the heading of equality, for example, can in most cases be asked for under the heading of welfare; and the heading of rights, extended to include rights proposed as well as rights established, will

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 71 cover any discrepancy. The considerations that we have just canvassed regarding participation give some foundation for thinking that invoking it simply increases the redundancy of the repertory, for they seem to be reminiscent of one or another head long familiar elsewhere in the repertory. Direct consideration of other heads confirms this impression. Denials of participation offend against freedom or equality or justice or fraternity; moreover, such denials often violate rights, acknowledged or commonly advocated. The demand for majority rule implies a demand to participate at least in respect to information and effective voting, and thus far makes it unnecessary to demand participation separately. The demand for a decent standard of living (under the heading of human welfare) is much the same thing as the demand to partake of the benefits of a joint activity - here, perhaps, the over-all joint activity of carrying on a society with all its concurrent productive processes. Even the objections to lack of participation by others appear to be covered under the heads of equality and fraternity and justice. When they are directed against aloofness, for example, may they not be said to amount to holding that a person remaining aloof is in an unbrotherly way refusing unjustly to do his equal reciprocating share of contributing to the success of common tasks? Even if participation were, as this evidence may suggest, a logically redundant criterion in every respect, there might still be some psychological point to the fashion of invoking it. People may feel that other terms are worn out, whether or not the criteria which the terms stand for have been satisfied, or that the criteria have been satisfied according to the historic programs for satisfying them, but in ways that turn out to be in many respects mere formalities. If these feelings are to any extent well founded, a shift to stress on 'participation' can be justified as a means of rekindling hope and action. However, there is far from being sufficient warrant for saying that participation is a redundant criterion. At least four considerations tell against there being such a warrant. The first is little more than a cautionary suggestion, and the other three, though somewhat more substantial, are inconclusive. But inconclusiveness on this subject is unavoidable, in the absence of an exhaustive inventory of criteria in the democratic repertory with a complete synchronic account of the distinctive semantic conditions for the use of each21 - something which I am in no position to supply. I am not even sure that the project of supplying it is feasible, in the sense of producing results precise enough to establish a conclusive answer to the question of redundancy, though one might sensibly hope

72 Moral Objectives that work on the project would get farther than my present suggestions toward indicating that 'participation' would figure nonredundantly in a plausible idealized model of the repertory. I suggest, by way of caution, that stress on participation may change the distribution of emphasis placed on various other criteria for democracy, in a way not readily expressed, if it can be expressed at all, merely by invoking those other criteria in combination. The very obscurity of this notion of a distribution of emphasis may obtain some weight for it at this juncture. If we concede that there is likely to be some truth to the suggestion that stress on participation changes the distribution of emphasis, and just what this change might amount to is obscure, we should at least refrain from hurrying to the conclusion that participation is a redundant criterion. If stress on it increases the weight given to fraternity, for example, relative to the weight given to constitutionally entrenched rights to property or to a livelihood, then it would hardly be a redundant criterion in every important sense, even if everything asked for under it could be asked for under some other head or heads already present in the repertory. Of the three more substantial considerations telling against the suspicion of redundancy, one merges with another. The demand to participate often comes from outside group G; indeed, if there are people already participating in the way demanded, and G is defined so as to take in only these people, the demand can always be understood as coming from outside. The familiar criteria other than participation take no special account of this division between insiders and outsiders: both freedom and fraternity, for example, are looked upon as indefinitely extensible, not stopping until all mankind has been embraced; or (as is all too often the case in practice) they are treated as matters of concern only when they affect members of the same caste or race or nation. An analogue or variant of the division also occurs within a given group G. Everyone may acknowledge that the people demanding to participate are members of G; their demand to participate as much as members placed hierarchically above them might be pursued under the heading of equality. Yet equality may be sought and won without seeking or winning a recognized role in any joint human activity; separate facilities need not logically be unequal facilities, though they might still be obnoxious on other grounds. Moreover, equality may be more than what is wanted. The demand to participate is often directed against hierarchical organization without intending to do away with hierarchy entirely; what is wanted is a more responsive hierarchy, which can often

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 73 be realized by diluting the existing hierarchy with other techniques of social control.22 Many people would ascribe the current stress on participation to alienation from organizations run by hierarchies remote and unresponsive by their very complexity.23 The demand to participate seems in fact to be paired a good deal of the time with feelings of alienation, and this relation to alienation constitutes the third more substantial reason for thinking that participation is not a redundant criterion. For over part at least of its range - where it concerns alienation from work, for example alienation raises issues that the traditional criteria in the democratic repertory did not anticipate; and the pairing with participation occurs in such connections, too, as its invocation by Marx as a remedy for alienation illustrates. Moreover, participation pairs with alienation both in sometimes being outcome oriented and in sometimes not being. As we shall see in a moment, demands to participate are sometimes wholly or in part demands to be accepted in roles without reference to outcomes. Other criteria seem to operate mainly or exclusively on one side of the orientation distinction or the other; welfare on the outcome-oriented side, fraternity on the other. Those criteria that do operate on both sides are clearly distinct from participation: equality, in ways already mentioned; freedom, because freedom might logically be increased in most cases by by-passing any joint activity, whereas there is no participation without a joint activity to participate in. (The freedom to participate cannot be increased by by-passing, but then it cannot be defined without the help of the concept of participation.) The vagueness of the concept has to be conceded, and put up with, along with some obscurity about its nonredundancy. It is not only vague, it is polymorphously vague, afflicted with both the sorts of vagueness most often noticed, multiple-criteria vagueness and degree vagueness.24 The forms of participation vary so enormously that the features which some forms have in common with each other are less important in constituting them than the features which they share with forms of nonparticipation: compare playing offensive fullback for the Chicago Bears with observing two minutes of silence on Remembrance Day. Furthermore, the various forms severally admit 'intensification and remission of degrees/ both at the means stage (as with the approximation to veto power when the voting rule is varied from requiring a simple majority to requiring unanimous consent) and, in the end, in effect on the outcome. This vagueness, however, no more prevents us from using the con-

74 Moral Objectives cept of participation effectively, especially in the initiation of discussions, than it prevents us from using effectively the concept, say, of travelling, which is polymorphously vague too, as are many other useful concepts. Moreover, vagueness is indispensable to demands to participate, using that term, as they are commonly intended; to be properly expressed, the demands require a vague term. People want more say, or more to do; but they often do not know specifically just what say, or what to do, or when, or in what capacity. The demand to participate is thus a demand that groups and activities be reorganized to give people recognized roles which they do not now have and which they may not be able, at this point in time, to specify. The absence of this specification, when it is absent, does not make the demand any less serious. The absence - at times inevitable absence - of specification also vindicates in part the inclination, which I struggled with at the beginning of this paper, to find a paradox in the comparison between demands to participate and the description of the roles that might be held to satisfy the demands or to anticipate them. When an appropriate role in a joint human activity A has been established and recognized, the need to speak of participation tends to disappear, along with the demand for it, for it has a special name. (I say only 'tends' because sometimes, as for example in connection with conversations, especially diplomatic conversations, the word 'participate' does survive as the name of the role.) Moreover, the more clearly the role that is wanted is known and defined in advance, the greater (I conjecture) is the tendency to substitute for 'participate' a special name for the role. People demand the right to vote, rather than the right to participate in politics, if voting is exactly the role they want to play; or they demand to serve on juries. If they use the word 'participate' instead, or as well, is that not normally a sign that they have not made up their minds about voting or serving on juries being the whole of what they want? Demanding 'to participate in the judicial process' then expresses a demand both to serve on juries and possibly to play some unspecified role or roles beyond. VI

The role demanded is liable to be unspecified at least in part even when the demand to participate has in view a firmly institutionalized activity of a familiar group. So cases of this kind too partly bear out the abortive paradox about demands to participate being satisfied under some other name or names. But such cases not only have this feature: they have an

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 75 arguable claim to being logically paramount. Can there be a fully intelligible demand to participate without there being at least a specific group G in view, and also a specific joint activity A carried on by that group? Without such specific targets, can the demand be logically complete? I gave earlier, as a sufficient condition for full intelligibility in a demand to participate, the identification simultaneously of N, the person making the demand; G, the group in view; and A, the joint activity in question.25 Might this condition also be reckoned a necessary one, most surely met when the identifications are made by specifications expressed in expressing the demand itself? It would seem, moving in the ambit of these suggestions, that demands to participate are in at least one important respect inherently conservative demands. In presupposing groups and activities that already exist, they appear to accept existing institutions and to call for no more than roles in these institutions, to be given people at present excluded from such roles. It is important to realize that demands to participate may be conservative in this respect. One might wonder whether the current vogue for such demands does not reflect mainly a widespread and somewhat defeatist assumption that the large bureaucratic organizations in which we are all involved cannot be done away with and that the most that can be done with them is to try to make them more congenial in detail by diluting their hierarchical features. The tendency to consider a demand to participate as logically complete only if it has in view a specific group and a specific activity may thus work hand in hand with a pervasive compound fact about political attitudes: existing institutions are easiest to specify and considered very difficult to abolish. Nevertheless, the fact does not stand alone, and the tendency, even if one gives way to it, does not conclusively favour existing groups. The groups specified, and the activities, need not be existing ones, or familiar ones, or even ones easy to comprehend on first, advance description; they may in principle involve drastic and far-reaching reorganizations of present institutions, or wholesale substitutions for these. Even if the inevitability of bureaucratic organizations is accepted, the present bureaucracies may not be. Those demanding to participate may insist that the sorts of recognized roles which they want, with what would in their eyes be significantly increased participation, can only be obtained from new organizations. Furthermore, organizations less bureaucratic may be envisaged, with provisions for decentralization and multiple participation.26

76 Moral Objectives At the limit, the form of organization specified in specifying the group and the activity and the expected character of the participants may be radically different from what now obtain. I am not thinking only of the new men and women who are to live under Communism-thefinal-stage. I am thinking, for example, that the demand for full participation by students in university government is not necessarily defeated by demonstrating (if indeed it can be demonstrated) that the present students would not be competent to participate fully in running universities of the present kind. Those who make the demand may believe, or come to believe, that, to obtain participation, universities should be turned into institutions devoted chiefly to long-term adult education and university students into adults returning from time to time to the universities with the competence gained in a variety of careers. Demands to participate thus vary from being quite conservative in their attachment to existing institutions - more conservative than lots of political demands coming forward under other heads - to being maximally radical. The vagueness of the concept does, however, foster a tendency for the demands, once started, even under conservative assumptions, to increase continually and to become more radical in becoming larger. Any form or degree of participation short of predominance is subject to being repudiated as merely 'token' participation - 'genuine' participation, it continually appears, would carry with it much more power and scope. Such moves are easily, but wrongly, dismissed a priori as instances of cynical tactics. People demanding to participate have no monopoly on cynical tactics in this connection. Such moves are to be expected, moreover, even when there is perfect good will on both sides. The concept of participation is more useful for initiating discussions than it is for bringing them to an end. There are no standard indications, helpful for either side, of satisfactory stopping places short of predominance. These are left by the concept to be worked out on an ad hoc basis suitable to each particular case. But this arrangement is a precarious one; the conceptual vagueness on which it depends is bound to cause uneasiness in those who use the concept. When the uneasiness rises to the point of inviting closure, the people who demand to participate are likely to effect closure by applying the most familiar conception of legitimate power ready to hand, which will almost always be majority rule; and no more imaginative about appropriate arrangements than the advocates of participation, the people on the other side are not likely to have an alternative

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 77 answer, or at any rate any answer that is not subject in their own minds to undermining by their own sentiments in favour of majority rule. Yet in many cases affording participation without jeopardizing outcomes must, I suspect, require very subtle and imaginative efforts of sociological engineering in defining and redefining roles and activities; though this suspicion, like all the other considerations affecting demands to participate, is liable to be abused by people who do not want to meet the demands. VII

Up to this point in my discussion of demands to participate I have continually kept in view the relation of such demands to the outcomes of joint human activities. I have tried to avoid giving undue prominence to the outcomes of decision-making activities; I have meant to make no more of voting, for instance, than it deserves as a special case of a joint activity that often has important outcomes and as the source of helpful analogies respecting certain dimensions of participation. But I have given pre-eminent attention to outcomes of one sort or another, and I have reckoned the dimensions of participation in terms of those outcomes. I have done no more than hint from time to time that there is another perspective on participation, in which the relation to outcomes is not of prime importance, and which ought not to be entirely subordinated to the perspective in which it is. In this other perspective, people can be seen to demand to participate not because, or not just because they want to affect outcomes; but because they want to be treated as persons by people who have been ignoring them and perhaps in the course of ignoring them treating them as objects to be exploited without regard to their claims as persons. Among those claims are claims bearing not upon outcomes but upon the relations of mutual recognition and reciprocity that constitute (or should constitute) the activity itself. People demand to participate sometimes mainly, sometimes simply, because they want to be joked with, gossiped with, applauded, teased, argued with, striven with, reassured - in short, to count in the others' eyes as friends or possible friends, as teammates, or as worthy rivals - perhaps as all three at once. The attention that I have given to participation in relation to outcomes is perhaps not objectionable if it disavows any pretense to exclusive rights over the subject. For outcomes still matter, even if they are not the only things that matter. The demands to participate in our time

78 Moral Objectives most familiar, urgent, sustained, and widespread are demands related to outcomes. Workers demand to participate in management in order to affect outcomes with respect to their conditions of work and training, and outcomes having to do with the disposition of profits, investment, and the location of industry.27 French Canadians in Quebec demand increased participation in making economic policy; they want to be 'maitres chez nous' so that they can make sure that the outcome of economic policy will strengthen and preserve their cultural community. Blacks, whether they are still willing to participate alongside whites or not, want to affect outcomes regarding schools, jobs, and places to live. Women will count themselves liberated only when they participate fully enough in activities now carried on chiefly by men to make sure of outcomes more favourable to themselves, for example, in salaries and offers of part-time work. Less organized than any of these movements, but no less articulate, are renewed demands for bringing technological change under control, so that (for example) the outcomes are less unfavourable to human ecology; broader participation, if not universal participation, and broader agendas for economic policy are demanded as techniques for achieving such outcomes. The demands to participate just surveyed are, then, all outcome oriented (and notably they are all demands aimed at affecting sorts of outcomes reached through decision-making processes). The prominence that I have given to the relation to outcomes is so far justified by the prominence given to it by people actually making specific demands to participate. Nevertheless, they as well as I may be thinking of participation too much in terms imposed upon us by the commercial and technological biases of our present culture. The language of outcomes runs all too close to the language of outputs; indeed, after some decades of experience, practical and metaphorical, with computers, the word 'output' is now as much at home in the discussion of decision-making processes as it is in the discussion of material production. We need to recall that not all joint human activities are activities designed to have outputs or outcomes beyond themselves; not all are decision-making activities; not all are productive, or meant to be productive. Those people running together in the park may be using benefits to their health merely as a pretext: what they are really there for are simply the current enjoyments of exercise, fresh air, and comradeship. Or consider parties and conversations among friends: what outcome need a party or a conversation have? The jointness of such activities is not the jointness of collaboration in producing anything beyond them-

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 79 selves; it consists rather in people accepting and welcoming each other's presence and in their rejoicing at each other's present happiness. A life ideal proposed by Dr Johnson comes close to being an adequate illustration: If ... I had no duties, and no reference to futurity I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation/28 A 'be-in' illustrates the point no more vividly perhaps, but at least on a larger scale: 'There are ... rituals/ Theodore Roszak says, 'in which men participate democratically for the purpose of freeing the imagination and exploring self-expression ... Such are the "rites" that our hippies improvise for themselves out of potted anthropology and sheer inspiration ... The tribalized young gather in gay costume on a high hill in the public park to salute the midsummer sun in its rising and setting. They dance, they sing, they make love as each feels moved, without order or plan ... All have equal access to the event; no one is misled or manipulated. Neither kingdom, nor power, nor glory is desperately at stake. Maybe, in the course of things, some even discover in the commonplace sun and the ordinary advent of the summer the inexpressible grandeur that is really there and which makes those who find it more authentically human/29 I am not sure I understand Roszak's further suggestion that this sort of activity might be 'the ultimate expression and safeguard of a participative democracy, without which the popular control of institutions might always be corrupted by partisan interest or deference to expertise';30 but I agree that he has illustrated participation in a way that poses a moving challenge to the outcome or output orientation of most current demands to participate, and to the would-be progressive spirit in which they are put forward. The hippies' demand to participate goes deeper than a demand to have a part in controlling the bustle of production and technological change; it is a demand for a different sort of activity, and it implies a protest against the bustle itself. [Another example that strikes a quaint note in 1998. It is a note that may sadly remind us that we have lost something in suggestions about enriched lives with the vanishing from the scene of hippies and their naive enthusiasms.] Participation could not go further in not being outcome oriented, since the joint human activity could not go further. Participation that is not outcome oriented can also be present, however, in activities that are; and the demand to participate may be concurrently outcome oriented and something else besides. Suppose in a certain city a seat on the library board goes for the first time to a black man; he has proposals to

80 Moral Objectives make, and they are all accepted unanimously, so that his desires with respect to outcomes are wholly fulfilled. But the other members of the board never really listen to him; they never seek his advice; they give him no sign that they value his presence and cooperation. Would he not rightly think that the participation afforded him fell far short of what he might reasonably demand? The very speed with which his proposals were accepted would add to the insult and injury done him. Evidently there was an actual case at the business meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1970. I am told that a women's group introduced some resolutions about policies regarding women, which were immediately passed, and passed unanimously. The women concerned were furious; they had wanted to hold a discussion of the resolutions and be listened to.31 Note, 1998 It cannot be said now that the subject of participation has been 'little explored/ but it has certainly fallen out of fashion with philosophers. Not so with political theorists, given the continuing attention to a book such as Benjamin Barber's Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, with new Preface 1990). I do not know, however, of any sustained effort superseding mine to analyze the ordinary use of 'participation.' Notes 1 For evidence that my illustration keeps reasonably close to the historical facts that inspired it, see Alison Burford, 'The Builders of the Parthenon/ in Parthenos and Parthenon (Supplement to Greece and Rome, vol. X, 1963), ed. G.T.W. Hooker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 23-34; also, Robert Scranton, 'Greek Building/ in The Muses at Work, ed. Carl Roebuck (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 2-34, esp. 3-5.1 am indebted to Alice Braybrooke for these references. 2 Joanne Arnaud called my attention to 'partake.' 3 I shall not make any serious attempt to relate 'participation' in the senses I am treating to 'participation' as a technical philosophical term used in translating Plato. There is a passage in Simmel that indicates, however, that such a relation might be found, and not appear too contrived. Simmel says, The larger the number of groups to which an individual belongs, the more improbable is it that other persons will exhibit the same combination of group-affiliations ... Concrete objects lose their individual characteristics as

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 81 we subsume them under a general concept in accordance with one of their attributes. And concrete objects regain their individual characteristics as other concepts are emphasized under which their several attributes may be subsumed. To speak Platonically, each thing has a part in as many ideas as it has manifold attributes, and it achieves thereby its individual determination. There is an analogous relationship between the individual and the groups with which he is affiliated ... As the person becomes affiliated with a social group, he surrenders himself to it... But he also regains his individuality, because his pattern of participation is unique.' Georg Simmel, The Web of Group-Affiliations,' in Conflict (and) The Web of Group-Affiliations, trans. Reinhard Bendix (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1955), 140-1. If for 'groups' we substitute 'characteristic activities of the groups,' the passage applies directly to 'participation' in the senses I am treating. 4 Cf. the discussion by Carole Pateman, in her Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chap. 2, of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and G.D.H. Cole. 5 These points about discovering interests were inspired by Professor Peter Bachrach's paper, 'Interest, Participation, and Democratic Theory,' in Participation in Politics: Nomos XVI, eds. J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman (New York: Lieber-Atherton, 1975,39-55), which I heard him present at the meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy at which the present paper was also delivered. In Bachrach's paper, advances in defining and articulating interests not previously known to the participants are particularly stressed. I shall leave the points for Bachrach to elaborate, but since they have now helped determine my conception of the educative aspects of participation, I have to mention them here in the course of explaining how the educative aspects can be brought to view within my general scheme for explicating demands to participate. The scheme was originally set up without asking whether would-be participants might still have to learn what their own interests are. 6 I owe this objection to William R. Mathie, whose illustration was exclusion on racial grounds from college fraternities. It has been suggested to me that my own example of a beauty pageant, which follows, is rather 'dated': I am inclined to admit that it is, in most parts of the United States and Canada, say, even outside self-consciously liberal circles. It may not be dated everywhere: Are there not still news stories about black coeds becoming homecoming queens where only white girls were chosen before? And in South Africa the example, far from being dated, would surely appear bizarrely premature. At any rate, I have not been able to think of a better example: Mathie's example involves joining a group, rather than (directly) a joint activity; an orgy, which would be a more topical example, and certainly qual-

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8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

ifies as a joint activity, has the drawback that I myself am not sure an orgy is to be disapproved (given various conditions), whereas I do consider beauty pageants degrading. So the present example accords with my own feelings, as well as being correct in structure. Cf. Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), esp. as cited (along with Schumpeter and Dahl) by Carole Pateman, Participation, 5ff. Apology 31-3; Republic 496 and 520b. Politics, 1325b. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957). Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). Downs, Economic Theory, 267 tt. Thucydides, II, 40; trans. R.W. Livingstone (London: Oxford University Press, 1943). Commenting on the phrase, OVK dnrpay^iova dAA' axpelov, which Livingstone translates 'not as "quiet" but as useless,' A.W. Gomme in his book, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 121-2, says that airpaynwv was a complimentary term in Athens as elsewhere; in that case 'detached' might be a better translation than 'quiet.' See also the interesting rendition of the passage offered in the comments on it by Thomas Arnold, in his edition of Thucydides (Oxford: Parker, 8th ed., 1882), who considers the passage to express an emphatic opposition to dividing civil society into 'two distinct castes; the one wholly devoted to the care of the state (like the v\aKS of Plato's Utopia) and maintained by the labour of a vassal people, like the Spartans with their Helots; the other degraded to the exclusive pursuit of trade or labour, and held unfit to concern themselves with any higher objects.' 'With us/ Pericles, in Arnold's rendition, continues, 'the statesman does not lay aside his humbler duties and employments; nor is the mechanic thought incapable of forming a judgment on public affairs. We consider no man to be so incapable; nay, we do not allow that or any other plea to be urged as an excuse for a member of civil society taking no part in that society's concerns' (236-7). I give a slight technical twist to the word 'outcome' by insisting that these outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Or, some people who deserve to be better off will be better off and no one who does not deserve to be worse off will be worse off. N's demand may be motivated by disinterested moral considerations, though it will not necessarily be accepted as nonintrusive just because it is. A religious fanatic who means only to save the souls of the present members of the group by stopping them from drinking, dancing, and making love will nonetheless be

The Meaning of Participation and of Demands for It 83

16

17 18 19

20 21 22

23

24

treated, if he demands to participate, as making an intrusive demand. There is much to say, which I shall not try to say here, about how groups are to distinguish between intrusive enthusiasts, whose demands may be rejected, and genuine reforming prophets, who ought to be given at least a cautious welcome. My phrases, for example, 'better off and 'deserve to be better off/ are perhaps general enough, however, especially if we assume that G and A are not illicit, to accommodate under the second exception all the disinterested demands to participate that are likely to be accepted by reasonable people as non-intrusive. L.S. Shapley and Martin Shubik, 'A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System/ American Political Science Review 48 (1954), 787-92; reprinted in Martin Shubik, ed., Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1964), 141-50. Simmel, Web, 193. Ibid., 195. Cf. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), on the 'decision-making-costs function/ which rises dramatically as the requirement of unanimity is approached, for in that region the costs of bargaining for the consent of any one voter are likely to be very high. Tf we include (as we should) the opportunity costs of bargains that are never made, it seems likely that the bargaining costs might approach infinity in groups of substantial size' (69). See Pateman, Participation, 61-2. 'Gang' is the British term. Cf. Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), sections 165,193,195,198. Cf. Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York: Harper, 1953), which gives the price system, polyarchy, and bargaining as three alternative sociopolitical processes available for combining with hierarchy in various mixed techniques for calculation and control. A complaint well expressed, probably in a representative way, by John Platt, in Perception and Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 116-17: The new idea of participatory democracy does not simply concern election of officials: it concerns the administrative decisions of those public officials between elections, to make sure they are not simply pushing people about for their own class purposes or administrative convenience. It is no longer enough for this to go to the polls and cast our ballots. We also want to be consulted. We do not want to be treated any longer as objects ... We want to be treated as co-subjects ... not manipulated by an elite, but instead shared with as a group, a group which is collectively determining its own decision.' Cf. William P. Alston, 'Vagueness/ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul

84 Moral Objectives

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Edwards (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), vol. VIII, 218-21. Alston's term for 'multiple-criteria vagueness' is 'combinatory vagueness.' See above. Such provisions might include increased use of polyarchy or of bargaining or of the price system. Cf. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics. Cf. Andre Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, trans. Martin A. Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 43-4; also 58-9. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Rodney Shewan (London: The Folio Society, 1968), vol. II, 160 (the anecdote dates from 1777 and Johnson's 68th year). Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 148-9. Ibid., 150-31. I have to thank William R. Mathie for his insistence on the point that even when outcomes are important, outcomes do not matter alone; and Alexander Rosenberg, for recalling the incident at the Eastern Division. Primitive ideas for this paper were tried out on a visit to Joanne Arnaud's class in political theory during the spring quarter of 1971 at the University of Minnesota, and early versions were read to the members of Pi Sigma Alpha, the honorary political science fraternity at Macalester College, after their annual banquet in May 1971, and to the Halifax Philosophy Circle in October 1971.1 am grateful both to those who listened patiently on these occasions and to those (patient listeners or not) who talked back, especially to William R. Mathie of the Dalhousie political science department, who acted as commentator at the Circle meeting and made a number of penetrating points, which I have tried to accommodate in the present version. I have also made visible use of points and examples offered by Bernard Davis, Rolf Gruner, and Alexander Rosenberg, in their contributions to the same meeting. Finally, I have had, and in large part have exploited the advantage of having, helpful detailed comments by J. Roland Pennock. During the meetings on participation in New York, the point was raised that the vogue for 'participation' as a vehicle for popular slogans and current demands may already have passed, faster than the program committee allowed for. That may be. The issues surrounding the concept remain important ones, politically as well as philosophically, and so little explored by political philosophers that the subject still requires a preliminary survey, late though the survey may be, perhaps too late for fashion.

5

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy

The worker of the 1970s, seated at the console of an automated factory, seems to have risen from his old status as slave to become instead an overseer of slave machinery. Perhaps the oncoming army of robots will eventually reverse the condition man dwelt in throughout the long dawn of prehistory, when he had no word for work because work was synonymous with living. Perhaps in the future he will have no word for work because he no longer needs to do any. More precisely, he will no longer need to do work in its pejorative sense - the unending, bone-wearying, soul-striving toil of plowing and planting, of lifting and dragging, of digging in the mines, of feeding machinery, of fighting the moving assembly line. Instead, he will be free to do the work that a robot cannot do, and which expresses his own humaneness - to build, carve, paint, write, act, design, to recover the charm of craftsmanship in an atmosphere of freedom. Is this prospect so alarming? Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow: Work in the Western World (1975). Work has been as much a part of the fabric of my life as food and shelter and love. I think it is to many. Helen Hayes, 'Reflections on Turning 80,' Newsweek (20 October 1980), 17

Reprinted from Social and Political Philosophy: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, eds. P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr, and H.K. Wettstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, vol. VII, 321-41. Copyright© 1982 by the University of Minnesota. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

86 Moral Objectives I feel needed and useful. Gary Beaman, Halifax sewer worker, pictured in Halifax magazine 3(2) (January 1981), 27, emerging from a sewer.

Work is an idea that has never quite, during the coming and going of technologies and cultures, got its turn to reign as a cultural ideal. An ambivalent idea - the idea of something ambivalent, which both attracts and repels, and thus evokes an ambivalent response - it has never quite shaken off its repulsive side, the side on which it is seen as drudgery. So it has never, showing its attractive side alone, become an unqualified ideal. Moreover, it has long been an ideal in jeopardy. The advance of technology has in several ways undermined hopes of making it fully practical; indeed, in these same ways, technology offers the prospect of making it irrelevant. It will not go unregretted. As an ideal, work has deep connections with fundamental moral notions about self-respecting lives fulfilled in the service of humanity, or, at least, in being useful to other people. What are people to do if they no longer, in having work, have activities that maintain those connections? The most favoured solution to the problem of how people are to occupy themselves otherwise, which is that they are to seek fulfilment in various more or less enlightened amusements, does not repair the moral loss. It does not, as I shall try to make plain in a final comment after examining the ideal and the jeopardy that it is in, even suit utilitarian doctrine, if that doctrine is construed in a way that makes it as convincing a guide to social policy as it might be. 1 The Ideal What does work involve on its attractive side, as an ideal? Consider work of some sort that meets the following conditions, which for reasons that I shall explain I shall call 'conditions for relatively highest esteem/ or 'RHE conditions' for short: (1) Doing the work, people produce goods that serve other people by meeting their needs. (2) That people should do this work and that these goods should be produced are both indispensable in this connection. (3) Doing the work, people use skills that are exacting (both in acquisition and in performance) in ways that other people respect. (4) The work is in some sense arduous for the people doing it, and necessarily so; there is no easier way of doing it available in current technology.

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 87 Further conditions, specifying further features present in some sorts of work, might be added: a measure of actual recognition, variety, a degree of autonomy, a chance to leave some personally distinctive impression upon the good produced.1 However, I shall concentrate on the four conditions mentioned, and even there my attention will be selective. I shall, for example, give most time and weight to the connection with needs; and hence to conditions (1) and (2), and the ways in which the advance of technology, with the operations of the market, make it difficult to meet those conditions. I shall not give any attention at all to the tendency of technology to eliminate struggles with nature or with other people, that is to say, to the elimination from work of the 'agonistic' aspect of life. According to Alvin Gouldner, this aspect has been so important throughout the history of Western culture to making life interesting that the threat of its disappearance can be regarded as tantamount to a threat of death.2 A full treatment of the fourth condition - arduousness - and a full treatment of the third - skill - would have to do justice to this suggestion. The needs at issue in conditions (1) and (2) are to be understood as distinguished as strongly as in the nature of things they can be from mere desires. They are to be understood as needs derived from basic needs that every human being may be presumed to have (though in some exceptional instances the presumption might be rebutted); or as these basic needs themselves. Some basic needs are more physically than socially oriented: The need for a life-supporting relation to the environment, the need for food and water, the need to preserve the body intact, the need to excrete, the need to exercise. Others are more socially oriented: the need for companionship, the need for education, the need for social status and recognition, the need for sexual activity, the need for recreation. There are, of course, plenty of other needs, but the case for treating them as needs depends on their being derived, more or less firmly, from these, or on their satisfying the same criterion. Several criteria might be found to which the list that I have given could be fitted. One that will serve is that something counts as a need if failing to meet it at some specifiable minimum standard of provision leads to observable incapacity or derangement of functioning in the persons affected, considered in the basic social roles assigned them as householders, parents, workers, and citizens. The RHE conditions are conditions for obtaining esteem. Why do I speak of 'relatively highest esteem'? Just how the conditions relate to obtaining esteem seems to me a complicated question. Sorts of work

88 Moral Objectives that meet the conditions get very different amounts of public applause. Few master plumbers get the applause for their work that a microbiologist wins for discovering a new vaccine. Few, too, have the social status accorded a proficient brain surgeon. It is hard not to think that greater applause and higher status imply greater esteem. Furthermore, some sorts of work that perhaps do not meet the conditions at all seem to have as much esteem as any, or more: Consider how celebrity is gained in art, music, literature, pure mathematics, professional sports, entertainment. On the other hand, some sorts of work that clearly meet the conditions are associated with miserably low social status - the status, for example, of many farmers and farm workers in many countries. The idea of 'relatively highest esteem' is a device intended to give to the four conditions mentioned as much credit in obtaining esteem as can be given consistently with these complications. Assume a set of people P all of whom have to work one way or another for their livelihoods, that is to say, perform services for pay, or engage in various activities of their own to make goods ready for consumption or sale. To each person i in the set P there will correspond a set Wj of sorts of work suited to her capacity and actually available for some people in P. I postulate (A) that if any sort of work in Wj meets the four RHE conditions that I set forth above, then these conditions are necessary conditions for any sort of work in Wj to have highest esteem. Even when they are met, the people whose work meets them may, because of low pay or lack of decent housing, or other disadvantages, be accorded only low status; but the low status is something anomalous and regrettable, indeed an injustice, given the esteem that the work itself calls for. I attach to the idea of 'relatively highest esteem' a further significance for comparisons across the sets of sorts of work Wj and Wj, etc., corresponding to different people in P. Postulate (B): Any sort of work in Wj that meets the four RHE Conditions will stand higher - will actually get more esteem - relatively to any sort of work in W (whether or not that sort itself meets the four conditions) than any sort of work in Wt that does not meet them. Very often, it seems safe to say, it will get more esteem than any sort of work in W: that fails to meet the four conditions. I could go yet further and postulate that work in Wj that meets the conditions will be assured of getting more esteem than any work in Wj that does not, with certain specifiable exceptions (the creative and performing arts again, sports, certain sorts of scientific work). Or I could even postulate, with some hope of making the postulate convincing, that whether or not such work actually got more esteem, it would

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 89 always be thought to deserve more esteem. These postulates would make more of the inherent present richness of the concept of esteem for work, and hence more of the content that may be ascribed to work as a cultural ideal. They would also make more of the tendency in our culture, especially vigorous in socialist circles, to hold that equal esteem ought to be given every sort of useful work; and at the same time accommodate the objection that some of the contrary variations in esteem are only apparent: More applause and higher status may be accorded rather for rare particular feats or unique talents than for the jobs in which they are exhibited. These further postulates are, however, I think, more controversial. To serve the purposes of the argument that follows, the RHE conditions need signify no more in respect to obtaining esteem than I have limited myself to in defining 'relatively highest esteem' by postulates (A) and (B). 2 The Jeopardy Both the commercial arrangements under which work is currently assigned and the impact of the advance of technology on work assignments create difficulties about fulfilling the RHE conditions. These difficulties contribute to the dissatisfaction with which many people evidently regard their work.3 How much of the dissatisfaction that exists has to do with not meeting the RHE conditions I do not know.4 I restrict myself therefore to arguing that even if difficulties about meeting these conditions do not play so important a part in engendering current dissatisfactions as one might imagine, such difficulties give workers good reasons for being dissatisfied, for they prevent them from having work of relatively highest esteem. I argue, furthermore, that the commercial arrangements under which work is currently assigned operate to make such difficulties frequent and to make any success in avoiding them insecure; and that the advance of technology aggravates the difficulties.5 I am more concerned with the advance of technology, because it is this that jeopardizes being able to fulfil the cultural ideal of work even to the degree that it has been hitherto. I should explain briefly how commercial arrangements make that degree limited. Many people nowadays are assigned work that does not produce goods that meet other people's needs as called for by Condition (1): They work instead to produce bubble gum, electric toothbrushes, home videotape systems, sugar-frosted breakfast flakes, door chimes, mentholated cigarettes,

90 Moral Objectives plastic flowers. Even people who do have work that fulfils condition (1) have no security in fulfilling it; whether they have such work, with such results, depends not on the importance of meeting other people's needs, but on commercial considerations. When everything goes according to his plans, a farmer may take some satisfaction in the fact that his grain will become bread for many; but how much he plants, or whether he plants at all, does not depend on any commitment to meet people's needs. However much he plants, he will be better off if the price is high and people on that account find it more difficult to meet their needs. Commercial considerations prevail again if he has a chance to assist in restraining competition; with his consent, his production may be limited by a concerted plan, or what he produces withheld from the market, even destroyed, if doing so keeps up prices, though somewhere people go hungry. How can the farmer, in good conscience, claim to be working in accordance with condition (1), when meeting condition (1) is just an unplanned contingency, an accident? It must be clear to him, furthermore, that his work can hardly be meeting condition (2), indispensability, when the dangers that unrestrained competition poses for him clearly imply that his work is all too dispensable. The person delivering home heating oil is in essentially the same position: Her work may cease at any time, and its connection with meeting the needs of other people may be broken, even when these needs in part go unmet, if the firm that she works for finds it more profitable to suspend operations for a while, or to divert its resources into some other line of business entirely. Marx's objections to commercial arrangements - to having work governed by prospects of exchange - no doubt are naive to some degree, failing to allow for the possibility that even a planned economy will find it better to make considerable use of the market than to renounce the market entirely.6 However, insofar as his objections bear on the extent to which reliance on the market - or on commercial distortions of the market may undermine that part of the significance and satisfaction of work which depends on the connection with meeting needs there is nothing naive about them; or about Veblen's, which here come to much the same thing.7 The advance of technology makes things worse by jeopardizing, not just the security with which any particular person's job is connected (when it is connected) with meeting needs, but the very existence of any work that meets the RHE conditions. Technology eliminates arduousness; it makes skills obsolete; it introduces devices and techniques for

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 91 meeting needs that are capable of dispensing with work on anybody's part. The arduousness, when it is physical arduousness that is eliminated, is something that people may be glad to escape - though what is to be the fate of men whose esteem and self-esteem depended on feats of strength? Arduousness of other sorts cannot be given up so readily; it cannot be eliminated without eliminating challenges to human powers. Since (I suppose) it figures always, or almost always, in the application of exacting skills, its continuance in work depends on the continuance of opportunities for skilled work. There is a common impression, renewed again and again by the press, that the advance of technology displaces skilled workers and reduces the number of jobs available, whether or not the jobs are connected with meeting needs. Close up, what is going on demands a more mixed report. It is not so clear, close up, that technology is advancing, or advancing steadily: Some advanced capitalist countries are suffering from 'deindustrialization' - the capital goods accumulated in industry are not maintained; new investment goes into the service sector.8 It is not clear, close up, that the advance of technology is going to be resumed: Past advances depended on the use of fossil fuels, and suitably cheap substitutes for these are so far more speculative than real.9 Even when an advance in technology is going on, it has mixed effects upon work. There is some displacement of skills - jobs that were done by highly skilled workers are now done by unskilled ones operating new machines; on the other hand, new technology calls for new skills and creates skilled jobs that did not exist before.10 There is some displacement of workers; but this displacement takes place in firms that have not kept abreast of technology; in the firms that take the lead in introducing new devices, workers retain their jobs, themselves acquire new skills, and find the interest of their jobs enhanced.11 There is some unemployment, which, moreover, may be permanent for people caught midway in their work lives; but advances in technology do not seem so far to have permanently reduced the net number of jobs available overall.12 There is a theoretical reason for thinking that any reduction would be temporary. According to the principle of comparative advantage, workers and new machines (for example, new machines governed by computers) will, after a time, be so assorted and assigned that they will all be at work where their own marginal (revenue) products are greatest.13 The machines might outstrip the workers everywhere, in physical produc-

92 Moral Objectives tivity; nevertheless, the machines will be used only in the sorts of work where they do best, compared with their own performance elsewhere. The other sorts of work will be left for people; and new sorts of work introduced by technology itself will be found there. If it were not for cyclical difficulties - depressions and recessions - maybe there would be little problem about people having work of some sort, even as technology advances. Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage cannot be counted on to operate quickly in the real world, given imperfections in the markets for labour and other factors of production; and it may not operate, given those imperfections, to the end. Moreover, even if it did operate fully, and quickly, it would not come anywhere near guaranteeing that people displaced from jobs where their present skills are called for are going to be re-employed at jobs with equivalent skills, or equal attractions in other respects, like pay and location. To get work again, people may have not only to change sorts of work; they may have to leave the place of their birth and attachments for a less friendly society in a more rigorous climate. In any case, they have to live henceforth with the chagrin of having had their former skills rendered useless. Can they help feeling a good deal of insecurity in whatever new skills they acquire? Will not workers not yet displaced feel the same sort of insecurity about skills that for the moment remain current? Moreover, if automatic machines exist, which could do the work of these sorts of workers, and indeed could in doing it produce more goods of higher quality, the fact that for the time being (given the current stock of such machines) the machines are more conveniently employed elsewhere, and employed in production that does not meet needs, does not in its consequences for esteem offset the fact that the work done by the human beings who belong to the sorts of workers in question is no longer indispensable to meeting needs. The work in question may well have lost already, through the introduction of machines that still had to be served by these workers, arduousness and skill, too, and with these losses become trivialized to a degree. The loss of indispensability trivializes it further and quite negates its chances of being work of relatively highest esteem, defeating one of the RHE conditions categorically and coming much closer to breaking the connection with meeting needs. If the connection survives for the work in question, it is only because as a current contingency the first RHE condition (in fact meeting other people's needs) continues to be fulfilled. This is so, however, only as an incident of seeking more global production rather than less, whether

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 93 through planning or through letting the market operate freely. The economy, operating under the principle of comparative advantage, is set up to allocate tasks to workers or to machines so as to produce more goods rather than less; once at least it is capable of meeting needs somehow, it gives no consideration to whether additional goods are strictly needed or not. If it could produce more luxuries by assigning automatic machines to producing goods to meet needs, superseding in this connection human beings who would otherwise work to produce the goods, it would assign human beings entirely to producing luxuries. In upshot, the assignment of human beings to work that meets needs may be regarded, so far as some sorts of workers are concerned, as merely a means of enabling them to make their most effective contribution to producing a maximum of luxuries, some of them as trivial as can be imagined. Giving full weight to the principle of comparative advantage, it may be apprehended that the further advance of technology will make the work of more and more sorts of workers dispensable and trivial in this way - at the limit the work of every sort. 3 Expansion of Needs The limit at which every sort of worker could be displaced from the production of goods meeting needs by automatic machines now in stock were it efficient overall to displace the sort in question - has no doubt not yet been reached; even further off is the limit at which it would be possible in this connection to displace all sorts of workers simultaneously. Some comfort - temporary, perhaps, but perhaps enough to last out the work lives of many people - may be taken from these facts. Some comfort may be taken, too, from gaps and delays in the advance of technology, or even, wryly, from the possibility that, because of problems with energy, technology will never catch up with the growth of world population, and hence never advance very close to the point of making work by human beings dispensable in meeting needs on a world scale. Even now, one might well think, the connection with meeting needs could be restored, where it has been broken or attenuated, in the rich countries, by arranging to devote more of the output of these countries to meeting needs in the poor ones. None of these considerations undo the difficulties about meeting the RHE conditions actually created for people who have suffered in respect to their work from the vicissitudes of the market or from the impact of technological change. None of them undo either the reasons for thinking

94 Moral Objectives that the remaining chances of meeting the conditions are in jeopardy, should technology continue to advance and in advancing continue to introduce machines capable of superseding human beings in work that they have done hitherto. Is there not, however, a way of dispelling the jeopardy that I have disregarded up to now? I have treated the first of the RHE conditions as if the needs that it refers to must be needs on a restricted basic list. Many people who have thought about technological change have in fact expected needs to multiply as technology advanced. Marx and Engels declare that the satisfaction of one need leads immediately to the appearance of another.14 Jean Fourastie pictures the sphere of human needs as being capable of indefinite expansion.15 May it not be hoped that any threat of superseding workers in respect to meeting needs on the basic list will be offset by opportunities for new employment answering to additional needs? There are, as it happens, at least three senses that can be given to 'the expansion of needs.' In two of them, the notion offers some real assistance in meeting the RHE conditions (and thus keeping up the relevance of work as a cultural ideal), though the assistance falls very far short of any fundamental or permanent guarantee. Another sense does no more than make a verbal difference, which leaves the issue of meeting the RHE conditions basically unaffected. This is the sense in which no distinction is drawn between the expansion of needs and the expansion of wants. Writing in languages that do not like English continually invite a distinction between needs and wants, Marx and Engels and Fourastie may have had nothing more in mind than the expansion of wants. Marx himself, moreover, though he sometimes writes of needs in a sense that is restricted in a way corresponding to a list of basic needs, continually uses the term 'needs' (Beduerfnisse) in a way so generalized that it keeps company throughout with what he calls 'use value/ a term that is itself so generalized that it applies to any object of desire whatever.16 So used, it corresponds to the English term 'wants/ which is even more frequently - and more suitably - used in the standard terminology of economics, and covers both matters of need and matters of preference only. One can feel how inadequate this sense of 'needs' is to deal with the issue of meeting the RHE conditions by feeling the effect of trying it out in another context where the force of the terms depends upon its having a restricted sense. In The Critique of the Gotha Program Marx anticipates that in the transformed society work will become 'the prime necessity of life'; and to express the principle on which such work will be carried on,

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 95 he borrows from the Acts of the Apostles the well-known slogan, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.17 How much of the force of this slogan remains if we understand it to mean, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his whims'? Perhaps this reading is too tendentious, but would it not be justified if work to meet basic needs disappeared? Less tendentious versions, whether or not they allow explicitly that such work may continue, are hardly more convincing: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his desires'; 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, desires, or whims.' The reason for the loss of force is not far to seek. What is at stake in having opportunities to meet people's needs is having opportunities to help other people in ways that it is agreed it is good to help them urgent, morally primary matters. Whims (mere preferences, matters of preference only), even, in general, desires, do not have the moral urgency of basic needs. Indeed, what people desire or prefer may be, not just trivial or misguided, but actually pernicious, being harmful to themselves or to others. Moreover, other people's preferences, even when pernicious preferences have been put aside, have distinctly less claim on a moral agent than their needs. A moral agent is indeed bound in various ways to respect the preferences of other people. Not to respect them (some of them) is not to respect other people's freedom; it is not, one might argue, consistent with respecting their needs either, since a need to have at least some of their preferences heeded may be held to be among their needs. An agent's own preferences, however, if they do not take precedence over other people's, at least counterbalance them in justified claims on her attention. It is quite different with needs, at any rate with basic needs: If the agent, as child, spouse, parent, friend, or fellow citizen, has any responsibility at all for the fate of particular persons other than herself, her preferences must, within the scope of that responsibility, give way to their needs. Yet not all matters of preference can be regarded simply as belonging to a different sphere from needs, a sphere that affluence permits people to enter once their needs are provided for. With affluence, preferences make a difference to needs by playing a part in raising the minimum standards of provision for needs on the basic list. The forms of provisions, as well as the quantities, formerly accepted as meeting minimum standards become too disagreeable as well as too exceptional to limit anyone to. The most ne'er-do-well family on poor relief may expect to have indoor plumbing. With affluence, furthermore, social arrange-

96 Moral Objectives ments often become more complex, creating needs that are derived from the conjunction of these arrangements with needs on the basic list. In a market economy, one has, for example, to pay for the provisions that meet the basic needs; one has to have a job to obtain the wherewithal to pay; to get to the job, with the nonmatching dispersion of dwelling places and workplaces typical of North America, one has to have some means of transport. These conditions could be eliminated by reorganizing society; no doubt if people firmly and steadily preferred other arrangements, society could be reorganized accordingly. However, at the moment, the arrangements impose corresponding derived needs. Derived needs, so described, differ in the principle of their origin from the raised minimum standards of provision that follow from more liberal conventional views of needs. However, they often coincide in the end (for example, in the need for indoor plumbing); and they may be held to make the same sort of contribution to the expansion of needs, since they both build upon the same unchanged list of basic needs. Moreover, the contributions that they make, as new needs, to the problem of generating work that meets the first RHE condition have much the same strengths and weaknesses. They may reasonably be taken together to supply a second sense for 'the expansion of needs/ The strengths of the contributions consist in having a foundation in the list of basic needs and in having, partly for that reason and partly because of continuing social arrangements, something of their inexorability. The inexorability, may, however, be objectionable; it may be argued that people would lead freer and happier lives if they escaped from these needs by changing social arrangements. The other weaknesses of these needs, in respect to meeting the RHE conditions, follows from the mere possibility of there being other social arrangements. A need that would vanish given a change of arrangements makes a less conclusive claim as a need than one that does not vanish. The position of the additional needs mentioned in the spectrum of needs is therefore vulnerable to a dialectic, which can be suppressed only by a sort of unanimous consent to ignore material facts. Everybody knows that in the past - and today, too, in other cultures - people have lived happily enough without making use of the things that meet these needs. Furthermore, everybody knows that during the advance of technology social arrangements are going to change further, and that in consequence many things required today to meet these needs will not be required in the future. The needs in question may themselves disappear; their present position is temporary and entirely conventional.

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 97 One might well comment that insofar as the contingencies contemplated in this dialectic have to do with changing forms of provision for needs that persist, even needs that persist only for a while, it is unreasonable to ask for more in fulfilling the RHE conditions than that people's work be directed upon forms of provision current in their time. Yet the advance of technology threatens to do away with work directed upon any current form of provision, without guaranteeing that other work for human beings will be offered when the current forms are superseded. The most satisfactory way in which the expansion of needs could be conceived as ensuring the fulfilment of the RHE conditions would be to conceive of it as adding not just needs with foundations in the basic list, but new needs to the basic list itself, and adding them at a rate that in giving people work kept pace with the supersession of work directly or indirectly meeting needs already on the list. Here, however, in just the sense in which it would be most helpful, the contention that needs expand indefinitely cannot easily be accepted; at first sight it seems very implausible. There is, admittedly, some reason to believe that the basic list that I have given - or that anyone else would give - is not complete and could not be completed. We may always make further physical and psychological discoveries about people's basic needs, sometimes with the help of new concepts. The need that human beings have to be under some stress is an example of such a discovery and of one moreover that involves some degree of conceptual innovation (in not writing stress off as a disadvantage). However, needs added to the basic list in this way can evidently, like the needs already on the list, be ascribed with presumptive universality to human beings regardless of differences in culture and circumstances. New needs of this kind, if they call for extra work, may furnish new bases for fulfilling the RHE conditions, but they do not support Marx's and Fourastie's position that technology itself can be counted on to furnish new needs to take the place of those now easily and securely met as a result of its advances. One way in which technology might do this is to shift people further up a hierarchy of needs with which they are all endowed by nature. Needs higher on the hierarchy would invariably appear, in very different cultures, once needs lower on the hierarchy were steadily met. Such a hierarchy was a familiar theme of economics in the mid-nineteenth century, from Thomas Banfield to Karl Menger.18 Marx may have had something like it in mind. Yet it accords better with the strain in Marxist theory that stresses the cultural plasticity of human nature to think of

98 Moral Objectives the needs higher in the hierarchy as being created by culture. When technology has brought about a sense of security founded on having needs lower in the hierarchy continually met, experiments begin with larger life plans now available - imaginable - in the surrounding culture. Successful experiments establish new needs, needs perhaps for rich aesthetic stimulation or for self-expression. People will be upset if they must go for days without hearing chamber music; or without playing it. In a subculture not my own, I presume that people advanced in the aesthetic of motorcycles might be upset if they were prevented from decorating their bikes and displaying them. Such needs would satisfy the criterion for the basic list, since failing to meet them, once people had begun living on a larger plan, would lead to incapacity and deranged functioning in the tasks assigned by basic social roles. It is not clear, however, that they would create much new work. The materials required for rich aesthetic stimulation and selfexpression might turn out to be for the most part relatively simple and either very durable or easily reproduced, as they are in chamber music and in watercolour painting. Moreover, a few people may suffice to provide rich aesthetic stimulation for many. A much more serious trouble with these needs is that one cannot easily move from recognizing the possibility of arriving at them to producing a number of convincing examples. Rich aesthetic stimulation and self-expression do not seem wholly distinct; and so far as they really would make an important difference to human capacity and functioning, are they not already allowed for in the present basic list, under the need for recreation? One might, it is true, anticipate that the minimum standards of provision for that need will rise as advancing technology increases productivity. Are we prepared, however, to give every claim to recreation, elaborate or refined as it may be, the force of a need? One strong reason for thinking that we are not is that the need for recreation, as we now understand it, is the need for relief from the cares and preoccupations of the basic social roles - householding, bringing up children, civic obligations, working. It is not a need for incessant amusement. The clearest and most convincing case of a new basic need may, ironically, be the need for work of relatively highest esteem. When the pressures of other needs have been dealt with, and the opportunity arises for the full development of human capacities, will not having work that meets the RHE conditions become a leading consideration? People who are hard pressed just to keep their heads above water will not worry much about the character of their work or become dissatisfied - perhaps

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 99 deeply upset - about not having work that entirely suits them. Will not their outlook and condition, and their needs, change, however, once the grip of necessity lower down in the hierarchy relaxes? So at least many social critics and prophets have thought, Marx prominent among them. But then resort to the expansion of needs as a remedy for the difficulties about finding work that meets the RHE conditions ends in paradox. It would be reassuring to a degree to discover that the needs on the basic list may be expected to increase in number as technological change proceeds; we might look to them for more scope for such work. The reassurance will not endure long in the company of the paradox - the ironic futility - that would be created if the increase in the number of basic needs should turn out to be confined to the need for work of relatively highest esteem. That paradox - that futility - may, moreover, be looked upon as founded upon another one. Is not work that fulfils the RHE conditions bound to try for its own supersession? The work, its arduousness, and the skill shown in it are all to be indispensable. But how can one be sure of this except by continually trying to dispense with it? Moreover, as Georges Francois has suggested to me, it is part of workmanship itself to try to make one's work easier by inventing new tools and new techniques.19 It is not just technology that defeats the ideal of work; the ideal, by promoting the advance of technology, defeats itself. Furthermore, whatever relief the expansion of needs, taken in any sense, offers in expanding opportunities for work of a kind suited to the ideal must be regarded as relief subject itself to being eliminated by further advances in technology. One may expect the work done to meet new needs to be superseded in turn; even if needs do go on expanding indefinitely, which cannot be counted upon, they may not create new work fast enough to offset the present rate of supersession; and the rate of supersession may itself increase. 4 Inadequate Amusements; Moral Loss If people reconciled themselves to having, at present or in prospect, only sorts of work that answered to other people's preferences rather than needs, and thus renounced hopes of fulfilling the first RHE condition, they and their work would remain in jeopardy in respect to the other three conditions. Technology may be expected to advance to superseding the skill and the arduousness of sorts of work answering to preferences, too, and to rendering these sorts of work dispensable. Sooner or later - increasingly, as sorts of work offered human beings are super-

100 Moral Objectives seded, whether answering to needs or not - will not most people have to expect to occupy themselves mainly in activities other than work? Already, discussions of the dissatisfactions of work lead as much and as often to inferences that lives outside work should be made more agreeable as to recommendations for changes in the character of the work. Indeed, as the Industrial Revolution has proceeded, this has been traditionally the main response to complaints about adverse effects on the character of work - repetitiveness, rigid scheduling, boredom. Is it not the same response, amplified, that applauds the elimination of work as liberation? People supposedly are going to be freed to do other things, more agreeable, and some of them more esteemed. Marx seems to welcome cheerfully, as a prospect of liberation, the reduction to the vanishing point of work done to meet basic needs 'necessary labour' in one of the two senses that he gives to this term. To do so does not consort easily with his expectation (expressed elsewhere) that the dignity of labour will be heightened by becoming, in the transformed society, 'the prime necessity of life/ Nevertheless, it is a natural reaction to the impression that automatic machinery will put an end to drudgery. The character of the work that remains, Marx considers, will become either so simplified as to render traditional skills obsolete or so refined as to be highly intellectual - inventing the machines or drawing up plans for their use. Free time will increase enormously; it will be largely devoted to esteemed activities like musical composition and mathematical research, which (as Marx notes with regard to the first) can be 'damned hard work/20 In these expectations, of course, Marx does not differ from bourgeois optimists. The optimism is in both cases precarious. One might wonder whether the advance of technology is going to leave esteemed activities of any kind untouched. Musical composition and mathematical research are already in part relegated to computers. Suppose, however, that some such esteemed activities - sport, gardening, autobiography, some other residual sectors of literature and science - go on setting tasks that are better done by the human hand and the human brain. It is an illusion to suppose that the esteem which these activities now obtain for their most successful practitioners can be transposed to their practice by anything like the entire population. The present esteem depends in part on a connection with meeting needs. When a demand arises to justify the activities in question, the justification commonly takes the line that they are useful. They are said to meet needs directly, in providing recreation for the public that follows

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 101 the researches, publications, and spectacles involved. They may also be held to meet needs indirectly. Even societies affluent today have behind them a long history of intermittent anxiety about being able to provide for needs with assurance and sufficiency. The activities in question have given new insights into the human condition and the environment, and with these insights assisted in producing - in assuring the production of - goods that meet needs. They have assisted in achieving mutual understanding and peace, with favourable effects on meeting needs everywhere on the list. In the latter connection, sport may be held to contribute to peace by providing something like the desideratum of a moral equivalent to war and combat. The present esteem depends in part also on the public attention given to the activities. The effect of such attention cannot easily be distinguished from the effect of the fact that it is favourable attention. Even favourable attention may operate causally and noncircularly, however, in being cumulative and self-sustaining. Moreover, given that the attention is not unfavourable, does not the mere fact that so many people take so much interest in the activities as to follow them steadily contribute to the esteem in which the most successful practitioners of them are held? This interest and attention on the part of the public (or of divisions of the public) is limited, however. The attention of each member of the public is limited; and rationally it will be directed upon outstanding performances - with some exceptions, in which standards of judgment are consciously lowered, for occasional performances by family and friends. Even without a star system like ours, developed for commercial purposes, the attention of the public would be given selectively to a small proportion of the authors, actors, scientists, scholars, philosophers, and athletes active if anything like the whole population becomes active in such ways. Of course, by a miracle, the taste of the public and the talents of the creators and performers may be so diverse and so assorted that everybody, excelling in some branch of such an activity, will be able to find a part of the public that appreciates what she does. In fact, one must expect that were they to enter upon these activities hoping for attention, even fame, most people would end up painfully disappointed. Would they even have the consolation of having contributed to the maintenance of a high standard of competition? The best performers will suffice by themselves to maintain the standard and to push it upward. By and large, the best performers will suffice, too, to perform

102 Moral Objectives whatever useful services for other people - for the public - are involved in the activities, whether directly in meeting the need for recreation or indirectly in supplying insights and examples that assist in making provisions for needs more assured. Most people will have to count their practice of the activities as quite redundant, so far as serving or interesting other people goes; and must understand, if they care to understand, that it is redundant because their skills fall below the standard required for being useful. They must pursue the activities solely for their own amusement, as pastimes, as mere hobbies. It is this, using just the term 'hobbies/ that Arendt finds to be the outcome of Marx's vision of future labour.21 Can it really be what Marx or anyone else has hoped for, in looking forward to liberty for all human beings to play larger parts in truly worthwhile activities? It is true that some activities will continue to give people opportunities to be useful to others. They will not each have just to go on from one game of solitaire to another. By playing tennis, they enable their partners to play; they get the benefits of exercise and companionship (though there are other, perhaps equally agreeable ways of doing this), and assist their partners in getting the same benefits. Besides the needs mentioned, they and their partners are cooperating in meeting their need for recreation (so far as such a need persists, when no relief from hard work is any longer required). They are also - so far as tennis and other sports do provide an outlet for aggressions that would otherwise, in actual combat, take a form more dangerous to life and limb and liberty — cooperating in meeting the needs directly at stake with these things. There will even be activities that one can carry on by oneself which can be counted on to attract some gratifying attention: A person who cultivates a flower garden may expect to have the flowers admired by family and friends. Neither the usefulness from the connection with needs nor the attention on which esteem depends will entirely lapse. Tennis might be held to meet the RHE conditions except in not having the name 'work.' Flower gardening has a claim to the name, though it does not meet the conditions; we speak of 'working' in our gardens. Activities that both have the name and meet the conditions will not disappear entirely. Nevertheless, the prospect that technology offers, if it continues to advance on the lines that are now familiar, is a prospect of a drastically reduced range of opportunities for work, especially for work that meets the RHE conditions. One should not necessarily expect widespread despair, or even widespread boredom. People may well contrive to

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 103 amuse themselves in any case, and to lead congenial lives together, when they have little work to do and no opportunity to win esteem by achieving high cultural ambitions. Will they, however, be able to regard the amusements to which they will be for the most part confined as adequate alternatives to work that fulfils the RHE conditions? Looking back, how will they be able to regard with equanimity the end, or near end, of such work for most people? They will surely regard it as a loss of opportunities to realize an ideal that retains some lustre even in their eyes. They will not be like Mexicans today, looking back on the cruelty, including the cannibalism, of their Aztec ancestors, and wondering how people could ever have had such attitudes. They will not be like us, either, happy to have escaped the grinding toil of the past and some of its dangers, but regretting the loss of the courage, the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice that our ancestors sometimes showed in emergency and adversity. On the contrary, what will have been lost is something perfectly compatible with a peaceful, happy, and complete life. What will have been lost, with the loss of opportunities to help other people in urgent, morally primary matters, will have been so many opportunities to demonstrate sympathy, compassion, gratitude. A large part of the field of application for moral sentiments and ethics will have gone. One may anticipate, even if despair and boredom are avoided, an impoverishment of sentiments, a growth of egoism, a certain moral emptiness. 5 Questions for Social Science I have portrayed work as a cultural ideal in jeopardy, relying, in my discussion of jeopardy, on the fact that certain developments, or prospective developments, give people grounds for apprehending that it is becoming more difficult to offer people work that meets the conditions for work of relatively high esteem. I have begged some questions that properly demand survey research. Would many people, if they faced the difficulties that I have enumerated, be ready to give as much weight to them, turn by turn, as I have implied they would - as much weight to insecurity in meeting the RHE conditions, for instance, and with it weight to having any sort, or all sorts, of work lose indispensability? Would they regard work that continued to be assigned human beings only because under the principle of comparative advantage machines were more conveniently assigned elsewhere as no longer deserving relatively highest esteem? Do they in fact accord work relatively

104 Moral Objectives highest esteem in the way that I have expressed in setting forth the RHE conditions? Perhaps I might claim as a modest virtue of my argument that it raises some questions for survey research, as well as begging some. Survey research and dialectic, too - best both together - might vindicate my conception of work as a cultural ideal set forth (in part) in the RHE conditions and vindicate my account of the difficulties that jeopardize it. The conditions and the difficulties of meeting them may much more often than not elicit from people questioned about them judgments of principle that agree with mine. How much impact, however, are the difficulties, present and prospective, actually making upon people? To what extent are present dissatisfactions with work engendered by present difficulties? To what extent are apprehensions about the future engendered by prospective ones? Besides these questions about the general population, my argument, I think, raises some questions about people who take a lead in policy making. If having work of relatively highest esteem is as important as it seems to me, and as important as survey research might corroborate its being, why does it not figure more steadily and prominently on the agenda of social policy? Part of the answer, of course, may lie in the difficulty that industrialized societies - at any rate capitalist societies have been having in giving everybody who wants it work of any kind. This difficulty, however, itself raises again much the same question: if it is so important, in ways that everybody, employed or unemployed, understands, for people to have work, how can current rates of unemployment be accepted with so little sustained protest? One would think that, first, full employment, and, second, full employment at satisfying work - let us say, work that meets the RHE conditions among others would be matters of the greatest urgency, and that governments would be under unremitting urgent pressure to give them priority until they had been dealt with adequately. As it is, having satisfying work is a matter that may be entirely omitted even from imaginative scenarios by the boldest social critics.22 When it does, by exception, get some attention from governments, the attention leads to nothing. A Special Task Force appointed under the Nixon Administration by the United States Secretary for Health, Education, and Welfare studied the dissatisfactions of American workers and produced an exceptionally cogent report, Work in America, which brought out vividly the variety of dissatisfactions and their alarming consequences.23 It recommended a comprehensive Workers Self-Renewal Pro-

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 105 gram, which would in effect provide sabbatical leaves for everybody in the work force and periodically enable them to acquire new, higher skills. The cost, estimated (in 1973 prices) to be on the order of $22 billion, a very modest fraction of the United States Gross National Product, would have been paid for in part by funds transferred from training programs already carried on by government and industry, and in part recovered through increases in employment and productivity.24 Nothing, so far as I know, has been done to establish such a program. Nothing has been done either, I believe, to establish the limited alternative program mentioned in the report, which would be confined to workers in mid or late career and in skill categories growing at less than the average rate of 2.2 per cent. Its cost, as a net offset to GNP, was estimated to be less than $1 billion.25 The reception of the report in Canada may give a clue as to why satisfying work has so much trouble getting and keeping a place on the agenda. People at the National Council of Welfare have read and appreciated the report and cite its findings of dissatisfactions about work in support of an argument of their own that people have a need for 'the challenge of growth-potential experience.'26 But where do these Canadian policy makers look for such a challenge? Not in redesigned work, but in activities outside work; almost, it seems, without pause to think about making work more satisfying, they turn to what I have sketched as the alternative solution, a sufficiently engrossing round of amusements. Do they not do so because they assume that the prospect of finding satisfying work for the labour force as a whole is unpromising, even hopeless? One can easily think of other causes that keep satisfying work off the agenda of social policy: the private property system and the associated division of classes and interests; the complacency and indifference of the majority of the people who still count themselves as benefiting from the system. I suggest, however, that one cause, which operates with critics of the present system from Marx to our own time, is that people have the impression that the chances of giving people work that meets the RHE conditions is in jeopardy; and that they have the impression, furthermore, that there is no easy way of rescuing the chances from jeopardy. My argument has shown, I think, that they would be right on both counts, if they did have these impressions. Whether they do have them, however, and whether their having them has a substantial effect in keeping satisfying work from having a leading place on the agenda of policy makers are questions that, again, I must leave to survey research and allied inquiries.

106 Moral Objectives 6 Implications for Ethical Theory The relation of my argument to important issues in ethical theory can be treated less tentatively. What the argument (so far as it has been successful) has brought to light about work as a cultural ideal and about the jeopardy with which the ideal is beset implies, on the one hand, that utilitarianism construed in the somewhat deviant way that more than any other makes it a convincing guide to social policy turns obsolescent in the very moment in which we fill out the construction by adding a need for work. On the other hand, the day of utilitarianism, as traditionally conceived since Bentham, committed to the ultimate test of maximizing pleasures, may have dawned, though it dawns on a morally desiccated landscape. If utilitarianism is renamed and recast as the ethics of human welfare (or, of the welfare of all sentient beings), and welfare is understood as something achieved by meeting needs, one gains for utilitarianism the moral force and precedence commanded by claims of need. Simultaneously, one arrives at a position to explain how utilitarianism, in the absence of an applicable felicific calculus, can have had so much effective influence on social policy as it has had historically (for instance, in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century). One also exposes the imperceptiveness of the common objections to utilitarianism. Given the background of our received moral notions, it is easy to score points against the maximization of pleasures: How could it be justified, for instance, to violate anyone's rights in order to promote some other people's pleasures? The whole idea of basing morals upon pleasures invites rejection. Is it so easy to reject the idea that morals are based in the end on welfare? Or to score points about unjustified sacrifices against a principle under which everybody's needs would be met before the pursuit of pleasure could become anything like the prime consideration in social policy? While meeting needs continued to be difficult to accomplish, it was in meeting them that utilitarianism had its influence. Was this so just because meeting needs was regarded as a necessary condition of obtaining pleasures? Was London to have sanitary works just so that its citizens could engage in pushpin and other diversions? Even so, the concentration on needs enabled utilitarians to argue, not from speculations about the results of a felicific calculus, but from familiar, plain sorts of evidence about how many people in the population to be served had their needs met at specified minimum standards of provision. But this

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 107 was just the evidence called for by traditional moral concerns with meeting people's needs. Utilitarianism, by concentrating in practice on meeting needs, acquired the force of these traditional concerns. In practice, its innovation consisted in bringing such concerns directly to bear on laws and practices that had grown away from answering them or that omitted entirely to deal with current problems about them. Recognition of a need for work - for satisfying work, which fulfils the RHE conditions among others - enriches the ethics of welfare, as applied to human beings; and strengthens its claim to have established social priorities in a form that invites universal agreement. It is just in respect of this enrichment, however, that utilitarianism so conceived verges on becoming obsolete; for the prospects of providing for people's welfare in this regard become ever more limited. In respect to other basic needs, the ethics of welfare fails into obsolescence, not in becoming impossible to achieve, but in becoming so easy to achieve, given minimally enlightened social policy, as to have only vanishing uses in resolving urgent issues of policy. If in fact it continues to have such uses, it is because of grossly careless and unenlightened policy making at home and abroad. To revive its usefulness, the list of needs would have to be expanded, either by adding basic needs or (less cogently) by adding derived ones; but this expansion cannot be counted upon, and the point at which it is most likely to bring the most new force to the ethics is just the need for satisfying work, which is specially problematic. The time may have come, then, or may be descending upon us, to turn to utilitarianism as standardly conceived since Bentham, an ethics of pleasure. We have no satisfactory interpersonal measure of pleasures. We could make do either with censuses comparing the proportions of people who were pleased with life or happy under different policies, or with some reasonably satisfactory system of aggregating preferences.27 We should each be devoted, under some rules for minimizing conflicts between different people's pursuits, to the incessant pursuit of carefree self-gratification (quite in accordance with the current recommendations of pop feminism and pop psychology). Looking back at the situations, all too common in human history, in which resources have fallen miserably short of meeting people's needs, in quantity or distribution, it may be that we shall rejoice that we can now meet needs without trouble. Looking back at situations in which people have worked together, and succeeded in meeting their needs by working for each other's sake, will we not have to conclude that the elimination of work and trouble -

108 Moral Objectives success, supersuccess, according to the ethics of welfare - will have helped make our situation and our lives trivial?28 Note, 1998 The anxieties dealt with in this article run counter to the overall statistics about job losses and job gains reported in the notes. That is why the argument focuses more on the anxieties than on the statistics: The anxieties give full scope for reflection on the nature of work and its moral importance. The anxieties are still with us, though they still do not match the statistics. In the United States the overall rate of unemployment is lower now (1998) than it has been for years. On the other hand, there have been notable instances of workers being displaced in the course of technological innovations, for example, in the General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, one of the places in which Frithjof Bergmann (professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan) has put into operation one of his centers for 'New Work.' 'New Work' aims to bring in new patterns of work, with at once sharply reduced time in the factory and substantially increased selfemployment. Moreover/the position that there have been important overall shifts from more skilled to less skilled work still has support from economists, though not from all of them. See, for example, Gary W. Loveman and Chris Tilly, 'Good jobs or bad jobs?/ 127 (5), 1988 International Labour Review, 593-611. It will be clear to readers who read either this chapter or the one on Marx's concept of alienation with the other in mind that the two chapters substantially intersect in themes. The discussion of work here vindicates claims for the continuing importance of Marx's diagnosis and his (problematic) remedies. However, I deliberately avoided taking Marx's notions as the point of departure in the present article, and avoided doing so in the article on participation, which appears in another richly intersecting chapter. In both these cases, I wanted to make it clear that the issues at stake were not the special property of Marxist thinking.

Notes 1 Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow: Work in the Western World (New York: Putnam, 1975), 191. Of these, autonomy may be the most important psychologically and philosophically; it may in fact be more important than the connection with needs, in the sense that a lot of autonomy would do more to make up for a tenuous connection with needs than a strong connection with needs would do to make up for a vanishing amount of autonomy. Autonomy would do more to develop people's powers

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 109 of choice and their chances of settling upon enlightened life plans (see the persuasive treatment of these matters by Adina Schwartz, in 'Meaningful Work/ Ethics 92[4] [1982], 640-6). Autonomy may also do more to make people satisfied with their work day by day. Nevertheless, the connection with needs, on which I concentrate in this paper, deserves some sustained attention; it has had little, compared with autonomy; it requires a good deal. Only more space than I shall be able to give it could fully unravel the issues that it raises. I would argue, furthermore, though not here, that a fully satisfactory conception of autonomy would incorporate it: One cannot become fully autonomous playing solitaire, or bridge, or doing other frivolous things. I am in any case not alone in attributing both psychological and philosophical importance to the connection with needs: cf. E.F. Schumacher, Good Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 2-4,116-23. In Decadence and Objectivity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), Lawrence Haworth gives what may be looked upon as a philosophical response to the reduction of work connected with needs/ and he demonstrates the richness of the subject by exploring many ramifications that I do not treat at any length. I do not think that his proposed solution - the chief part of which is carrying on activities according to professional standards whether the activities are counted as work or not - makes up for a vanishing, or weakened, connection with needs. 2 The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 263. 3 There is, it is true, a pronounced tendency for people in Canada and the United States to answer 'Yes' when they are asked whether they are satisfied with their work. In 1978,90 per cent of white workers in the United States who were asked this question answered 'Yes'; 76 per cent of black workers answered likewise (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 100th ed. [Washington: G.P.O., 1979], 399). Canadian data are similar. They reveal, however, that the proportion of Canadian workers who report themselves as 'fairly satisfied' is substantially larger than the proportion who report themselves as 'very satisfied'; and perhaps even more significantly this is the reverse of the relation between the proportion of Canadians reporting themselves 'fairly satisfied' and 'very satisfied' with their marriages (Perspectives Canada III [Ottawa: Treasury Board, 1980], 284. Moreover, other signs, such as high rates of absenteeism, alcoholism, and mental illness, indicate - so far as they are connected with work - a good deal of dissatisfaction; see Work in America [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973], chap. 3. When people answer that they are satisfied with their work, they may mean that they are happy to have steady jobs and that, comparing themselves with fellow employees, they feel fairly treated, not that they are free from anything like anomie and alienation

110 Moral Objectives (W.A. Westley, 'Problems and Solutions in the Quality of Working Life/ 32 Human Relations [1979], 113-23). When they are asked about features of their jobs that are especially important to them, they tell a different story: Opportunities for promotion and the presence of a challenge to their powers are features important to them, and substantial numbers of workers report that their work does not have these features; see Work in America, 13,15-17,94-5; also Canadian Work Values [Ottawa: Manpower and Immigration, 1975], 29, 32. Very small proportions of workers in working-class occupations, when they are asked whether they would choose the same work if they had a chance to choose again, answer that they would - whereas 93 per cent of urban university professors would be professors again (Work in America, 16). Finally, could the outcry (in the United States, spring 1981) against proposals to reduce social security benefits for workers who choose to retire early have come from workers happy with their work? 4 The frequently reported absence of challenges to workers' powers bears upon condition (3), skill, and condition (4), arduousness. The absence of opportunities for personal growth, also frequently reported (see Work in America, 15-17), bears more upon features of work, like autonomy, that do not figure among my four conditions than upon those that do, though I think personal growth may be promoted by being needed and useful. The survey results that I have seen do not touch explicitly upon condition (1), meeting needs, and (2), indispensability. 5 The difficulties have to do with (a) actual reductions in opportunities for work that meets the RHE conditions and (b) insecurity in current employment at such work. Both (a) and (b) may affect increasing numbers of workers, and they may be apprehended as forthcoming even where they are not being realized at present. My treatment of jeopardy embraces all these possibilities. On the particular issue of having work that is indispensable to other people, condition (2), I consider, turn by turn, as appropriate, (a) not having one's own job indispensable to specific people to whom one's services are assigned, (b) not having any work of the sort to which one's job belongs indispensable to other people (whether linked to the workers by specific assignments or not), (c) not having any sort of work, taken by itself, indispensable to other people, (d) there being no sort of work, taking all sorts of work together, indispensable to other people. I treat indispensability throughout as a matter of recognized purpose rather than mere accident. Again, jeopardy involves insecurity and apprehension about reduced opportunities (and about increased insecurity) as well as actual reductions. Actual reductions are not alone, and perhaps not even most telling, in undermining work as a cultural ideal.

Work: A Cultural Ideal Ever More in Jeopardy 111 6 Marx's moral objections to the market - which convey an attitude of uncompromising hostility that persisted throughout his life - are most explicit in the passage Tree Human Production' in 'Excerpt Notes of 1844,' Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans, and ed. L.D. Easton and K.H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 277-82. 7 Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1914). 8 John Cornwall, Modern Capitalism (London: Martin Robertson, 1977), 196-9. 9 Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974). 10 Kranzberg and Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow, 185 ff.; Work in America, 20. 11 Eva Mueller, Technological Advance in an Expanding Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 12,14,57,69-70,119-25. 12 The labour force in the United States increased from 60 per cent of the population in 1960 to 64 per cent in 1979; unemployment went up from 3.5 per cent of the civilian labour force in 1969 to 8 per cent in 1975 and declined to 6 per cent in 1979; full-time civilian employment rose from 65.8 million in 1965 to 94.4 million in 1978. It fell a little from 1970 to 1978 in agriculture and forestry and rose by 19 per cent in the mining and construction sector; and it rose even more substantially (32 per cent) in the service sector. I do not know of a definitive analysis of such figures with a view to detecting permanent reduction in job opportunities, whether offset by factors other than technological change or not, but the figures do not seem promising. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 392,40. 13 Herbert A. Simon, The Shape of Automation for Men and Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 31-2. 14 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947), Sect. I(a), 16-17.15. 15 Jean Fourastie, Les 40,000 Heures (Paris, 1965): Laffont-Gonthier, 175-6,182. 16 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, chaps. 1, 7. 17 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program I (3); Acts, V, 34-5. 18 The theme and its discussion are reviewed (and revived) in an interesting unpublished paper by William T. Terrell of Wichita State University. 19 This was one of the main points of Francois's comment at Moncton, which I hope will be included in the printed proceedings of the colloque at TroisRivieres. 20 Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 138,124. 21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1959, originally published Chicago, 1958), 101.

112 Moral Objectives 22 For example, Hugh Stretton, Capitalism, Socialism, and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 23 Work in America, chaps. 1,2, 3. 24 Ibid., 129ff. 25 Ibid., 128. 26 Beyond Services and Beyond Jobs: People's Need to Grow (Ottawa: National Council of Welfare, 1974), 8. 27 See Amartya K. Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden Day, 1970), chap. 4. 28. The present paper combines thoughts from two earlier ones: 'Can the Expansion of Needs Rescue the Significance of Work?' read at the inauguration of the Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values, Westminster College, London, Ontario, 27-9 September 1979; 'Will Science and Technology Allow Us to Go on Working? A Question That Ideology Generates in Bourgeois Thought and in Marx's Too,' read at a conference on science, technology, and values held at the University of Pittsburgh, 4-6 December 1980. The second paper was preceded by a shorter version in French that was contributed to a conference on science and ideology held at the Universite du Quebec a TroisRivieres, 4-5 October 1980, and given again 31 October 1980 during the annual meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Philosophical Association at the Universite de Moncton. I am grateful to Richmond Campbell, Judith Fingard, Elizabeth Karger, and Lars Osberg for comments on this work during early draft stages; and to many people who reacted to the papers on the occasions of my reading them. Among these reactions, especially distinct impressions on my thinking were left by the remarks of Claude Panaccio, Kurt Baier, and David Gauthier, as well as of Georges Francois and Zdenek Suda, the appointed commentators at Moncton and Pittsburgh respectively.

BASIC MORAL OBJECTIVES: LIFE PLANS ANSWERING TO PERSONAL PREFERENCES

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6

From Economics to Aesthetics: The Rectification of Preferences

Nothing is more common as an opinion at work in the minds of social scientists, even if there is no social scientist who holds the opinion entirely consistently, than the opinion that preferences are ultimate, incorrigible, and without distinction as to deserts. The chief source of this opinion may well be the impression, which social scientists share with other people, that preferences are not only very diverse, taking one person with another; on many subjects, on most, maybe on all, preferences remain diverse as people's information increases, even to the current limit of expert information. Another important source lies in philosophical doctrines sharply separating attitudes or emotions expressed or elicited by value judgments from beliefs expressed in assertions of fact. A third source rises within the social sciences: it is the example offered by the treatment, in many respects admirably refined, which preferences receive from economists in the theory of consumers' behaviour. I shall begin this paper by making some philosophical comments on this branch of social science; later I shall set forth some hypotheses which themselves belong to social science rather than to philosophy. Their philosophical interest lies in the effect which I hope they will have when they are combined with my comments on the theory of consumers' behaviour, namely, the effect of restoring to view grounds for being confident that preferences can be rectified by imparting increased knowledge, though neither our provisions for rectification nor their connections with increases of knowledge are to be understood (let us give Reprinted from Nous, 8 (March 1974), 13-24. Copyright © 1974 by Indiana University. Reprinted with the permission of Blackwell Publishers.

116 Moral Objectives thanks) as threatening to eliminate all diversities of preference, in aesthetics or in other subjects. Let my m2, etc. be combinations of goods glf g2, etc. each present in some of the available combinations, and, if present and capable of varying in amount, present in various amounts in various combinations. Let P stand for the relation '... is preferred to ../ (by a given consumer). The theory of consumer's behaviour undertakes to ascribe to every consumer an order of such combinations (perhaps an ordering unique to him) which is consistent, in that (m^m^ -» ~(m£m^, and also transitive, so that (mj?m^ & (m^Pmk) -> (mjPmk). Ordinarily, it is assumed that none of the consumers in view has been satiated with respect to any of the goods glf g2, etc. present in any of the combinations mlf m2, etc. covered by his ordering. Such results and the assumptions on which they depend are of less interest for my purposes than the relation between any one ordering and the behaviour of the consumer whose ordering it is. A currently influential conception of this relation is that the ordering is not merely something expressed in behaviour, that is, in the consumer's choices.1 It is something (in principle) wholly revealed in the choices that he makes as prices and his income vary, which means, essentially, as some combinations mif my etc. become available to him and others cease to be. It is to be expected that he will choose different combinations in different price-and-income situations, though it is assumed that in every case his appetites have returned to the starting point before he is put into any given situation and his choice elicited. The ordering sought is one that is to hold for what I shall call an 'appetite cycle/ and the combinations covered include in each case all the goods that the consumer will consume during the entire cycle should he choose the combination in question. If, in one price-and-income situation where two combinations, mi and my are available, he chooses m{ and foregoes my then it is expected he will refrain, in every other price-and-income situation where mv is available, from foregoing it in favour of m (or in favour of any third combination rak that should by transitivity rank below m± as well as below m^. Let m£jn- stand for 'the consumer chooses m{ and spurns my in this series of experiments; then m£,m mfim-. This conception offers a number of attractions to economists. It makes no use of notions of utility or satisfaction in any sense that entails dubious interpersonal measurements. Moreover, the consumer is not, according to this conception, to be asked to consult introspection to order his satisfactions. He is not even asked to imagine what his future

From Economics to Aesthetics 117 choices will be. The conception thus evades a number of psychological questions, including some that have been important in the history of ethics and axiology. It also eliminates (in principle) a number of sources of unreliability. What room remains for detecting and correcting mistakes in a theory of consumer's behaviour constructed upon preferential orderings so established? No account is taken of any needs or aims or preferences that a consumer might have apart from his revealed ordering; and hence no account of mistakes relating to them. There is little or no room for the consumer to make mistakes even in establishing and revealing his ordering. Suppose in one price-and-income situation the consumer chooses a combination m{, with more beer for himself and fewer lessons in music for his children, rather than another combination m (differing only in those respects). In another price-and-income situation, he spurns mi in favour of m-}. Is anything in the way of a mistake to be made of this inconsistency? One might hypothesize that the consumer's tastes have changed and that one should therefore begin drawing up a new ordering for him. Considering the very long time that it would actually take to carry out the observations called for, waiting each time for the consumer's appetites to return to the starting point before putting him into a different price-and-income situation, it would not be surprising if his tastes did change in the course of the experiments. He might change from toddler into greybeard while the experiments were just getting underway. However, no one is going to carry out the observations called for, and perhaps the same liberty that is taken in envisaging them as possible in principle can be extended to envisaging them all as being collected in some very short time. Then perhaps the notion of a change of tastes would be out of place, though if we are going to foreshorten the time for observation so drastically, why should we not suppose that the time for changes of taste has been foreshortened too? Confronted with the inconsistency, we might decide to begin again in constructing the consumer's ordering, whether or not we wished to speak of 'a change of tastes/ Or, because we were convinced that the time was too short to speak of such a change, we might insist on trying to retain as much as we could of the ordering as compiled hitherto, and we might prepare (in principle) to run the consumer through some of the same price-and-income situations again to see whether the inconsistency would not disappear.

118 Moral Objectives So far as I can see, it would not make the slightest difference to what is normally thought of as the chief contribution of the theory of consumer's behaviour to descriptive economics which of these two ways of dealing with such inconsistencies is adopted. That contribution amounts to no more than assisting in the provision of an atomic model which gives intelligible postulational backing to observed aggregative phenomena of supply and demand. If it is to support particular features of those aggregative phenomena - downward-sloping demand curves, some curves descending more steeply than others - the model must also contain empirical assumptions reflecting those features.2 The techniques imagined for compiling individual consumer's orderings must be supposed to record consistent orderings sooner rather than later most of the time for most consumers; and it is convenient to assume that the orderings remain settled during short-run transactions in the market. The techniques mentioned equally promise to satisfy these conditions. If the first technique is adopted, however, of scrapping the old record and beginning to record the ordering anew whenever an inconsistency has appeared, room even for noticing mistakes in preference disappears from economic theory, to say nothing of room for rectifying them. Mistakes reduce to static in the observation process. Is there any more room if the second technique is used and taken to a successful conclusion restoring consistency to the old record? Any inconsistencies that appeared earlier in the observation process could then be looked upon as transitory deviations from the ordering finally recorded. Could they not be called mistakes by the standard of that ordering - by the standard of the consumer's own revealed preferences, once what those preferences really are has finally been established? Perhaps they could, but as mistakes they must be regarded as very trivial ones. Certainly they do not offend against any interpersonal standard founded in some sort of knowledge of the goods in question and indicating what preferences by informed people might be expected to be. They are, moreover, elusively hypothetical mistakes, since strictly speaking they appear only in an imaginary series of experiments. How are they to be matched up with inconsistencies in the real world? There, where the consumer's appetites for different goods would almost certainly be out of phase one with another, we would have to deal with the difficulty of discriminating appetite cycles, and deal also with the fact that a consumer does not choose overall combinations for whole cycles beforehand, but bit by bit as each cycle is run though. What combination he has chosen will become known only at the end of the cycle, and then

From Economics to Aesthetics 119 he will have furnished only the datum for one price-and-income situation. At least one other such datum must be collected before an inconsistency can possibly appear between his choice in one price-and-income situation and his choice in another. So we would have to wait through another cycle in real time to have any chance of detecting such an inconsistency; but by then, will not time enough have elapsed to warrant saying that his tastes have changed? Regarded as mistakes, the inconsistencies in question are trivial in another sense. They relate, even supposing they can be detected, to the ordering drawn up for one appetite cycle. The ordering for the next cycle may be quite different, without objection on this treatment of preferences, whether or not it is too soon to speak of 'a change of tastes/ To sum up, expressing the extreme to which this treatment of preferences has carried tendencies present in economics earlier, (Tl) On the revealed-preference approach to preferences, mistakes in preferences are either not to be observed at all or impossible to observe without ambiguity; and in any case they are trivial. Alternatively, one might say that on this treatment either no room is left for mistakes in expressing preferences or only room in which such mistakes in expression cannot be unambiguously established, since, by a connected paradox, the very room that is unnaturally denied the notion of mistake is opened up for a grossly inflated concept of change of tastes. Furthermore, preferences, on this approach, are manifested entirely by choices, each of which expresses a preference; so choices as well as preferences are involved in the paradoxes. (T2) On the revealed-preference approach to preferences, mistakes in choices tend to vanish from sight, too. Does this approach to preferences suffice for the purposes of economists nonetheless? The answer depends in part on the variety of aggregative phenomena which the theory is desired to help explain. One economist, Kelvin Lancaster,3 argues that a satisfactory theory of consumers' behaviour should help explain why some goods (grey Buicks, red Chevrolets) are close substitutes and why others not yet on the market can be expected to be in demand. These things, it is held, can be explained only by taking into account, not merely preferences for goods glf g2, etc. as they come packaged in the market, but also deeper prefer-

120 Moral Objectives ences - preferences, imputed or testified to, for characteristics clt c2, etc., of which any one market good might have several, and which, in any one case, might be present in any of a number of market goods. The consumer can then he thought of as striving to combine gs according to a technology of consumption4 that indicates which combinations are more efficient in extracting the cs that (in various degrees) interest him: from both Buicks and Chevrolets, roomy passenger accommodations; from one, perhaps, reassuring expectations about repairs. One might add that consumers converge in various numbers in their preferences for certain gs; the cs which the gs give up can be invoked again to explain why some goods (for example, Volkswagens) are extraordinarily popular. This move, besides enriching the descriptive scope of the branch of economics in question, accomplishes a number of things that an adequate philosophical treatment of preferences should demand anyway. (T3) Shifting to a two-level conception of preferences, in which 'surface preferences' (for gs) are distinguished from 'deeper preferences' (for cs extractable from gs) restores both the possibility of detecting non-trivial mistakes and provisions for rectifying them. For it can now on occasion be pointed out to a consumer, as a matter of public knowledge, that the combination of gs that he chooses, thereby expressing a surface preference, is less efficient in producing the cs that he seeks than another available combination. Simultaneously, the concept of a change of tastes moves back within its proper limits; for we can identify the consumer's preferences among cs - his deeper preferences with his tastes and expect to find them changing, not with every change of preferences for gs, but more slowly. One might also note, parenthetically, that the traditional normative use of the theory of consumers' behaviour as a source of prescriptions for rational choice becomes possible again, and with it an important though secondary descriptive use applied to agents compelled to conserve resources in harsh circumstances. However, (T4) An adequate philosophical treatment of preferences must insist on there being room for detecting and rectifying mistakes in preferences beyond the room provided by the two-level conception. Taking preferences as expressible for all manner of cs, not all cs are equally eligible for preference. The most obvious and urgent occasions

From Economics to Aesthetics 121 for rectification are moral ones, where a person is discovered, for example, preferring q, which can be obtained only by inflicting pain on other people, to Cy which can be extracted from benevolent actions. Prudential occasions, on which preferences destructive of one's health or future independence call for rectification, come not far behind. I do not suggest that the proper means of rectification go beyond means of persuasion even in many moral cases. Moral cases and prudential cases might be conceded, however, as exceptions requiring special treatment. It might be held that when the objects of preference are not, by exception, affected with moral or prudential interests, preferences are not subject to rectification. The main challenge to the argument for rectification, from the extreme at which mistakes even in choices tend to vanish, lies in the direction of preferences outside moral and prudential cases, that is, preferences in matters that at least in a very broad sense can be called 'aesthetic/ Here, too, there are mistakes in preferences to be observed and to be rectified. There is a solecism in speaking of 'mistakes in preferences/ which at this point I shall confess and proceed to set aside. It is a feature of the ordinary use of 'preference' (a feature which no doubt has helped mislead economists and others inclined to ignore mistakes in preferences) that the vocabulary for indirectly evaluating preferences attaches directly not to preferences so called, but to wants or tastes. Preferences so called are faintly dispraised as 'hesitant'; for criticism in depth, however, one must turn to the vocabulary dispraising wants as 'ignoble' or 'brutish/ and dispraising tastes as Tow/ 'crude/ 'depraved/ 'vicious/ There is also a rich vocabulary for praising tastes (as there is not for praising preferences so called, or even for praising wants): tastes may be 'civilized/ 'refined/ 'enlightened/ 'discriminating/ 'subtle/ 'sensitive/ 'delicate/ or 'sophisticated/ as well as 'correct/ Tastes are dispositions, and in admitting to these dispositions without reservations people admit to corresponding preferences. I am going to simplify matters by supposing that in these cases the two terms come close enough to denoting the same things to be, with minor adaptations in syntax, interchangeable. I am going to simplify matters further by invoking these cases as a licence for appropriating for 'preferences' the vocabularies of rectification associated with 'tastes/ If 'preference' is to be generalized into the sphere of tastes and beyond, it may properly be required to pick up the epistemological implications of these vocabularies on the way.

122 Moral Objectives In accordance with these implications, and with some reflection on the social aspects of technologies of consumption, I now set forth some hypotheses about processes the existence of which justifies us in considering that preferences for cs even in aesthetic matters are not only rectifiable but are constantly being rectified - even though, for reasons that I shall touch on, we may often be at a loss to illustrate the rectifications with arguments. They are hypotheses the investigation of which belongs properly speaking to sociologists or social psychologists; but they seem to fall into that class of hypotheses in social science which, in advance of being systematically tested, deserve some credence as formulations of familiar unsystematic consensus. (T5) People who master the same technologies of consumption converge in their preferences for cs; and the convergence persists. (T6) Some of the causes of convergence, besides the direct gratification each person receives from the cs that he extracts, are (i) social limits to variation in technologies of consumption, (ii) communication respecting the cs available with different technologies falling within these limits, (iii) jointness of consumption with parallel applications of the same technology, and (iv) jointness of technologies. (T7) Observed diversity of tastes (preferences for cs) is to be laid in very large part to (i) differences between the persons concerned as to competence in technologies of consumption, (ii) the fact that some technologies of consumption have been lately started up and remain unperfected, and (iii) the introduction of new goods gif g-, etc. calling for adaptations, as yet unsettled, on the side of technologies of consumption. Convergence on gs arises from and parallels the convergence on cs hypothesized in (T5). Besides the impressive connection with knowledge on the side of technologies of consumption linking cs with gs, we may wish to postulate, on the other side, cs of a remoter level, linked by supertechnologies to cs of the first instance. We must expect explicit knowledge of these supertechnologies to be very imperfectly developed, however: even cs of the first instance are elusive. Moreover, the knowledge embodied in technologies of consumption plays a double role: it assists in picking out efficient combinations of gs; it also (in a way to which direct knowledge of gs offers no parallel) brings to light cs that

From Economics to Aesthetics 123 we may infer (to vary a famous expression) people discover to be desirable because (with due practice) they discover they desire them. One must, to appreciate the character of this knowledge, as it is at issue in (T6), balance the use of communication, including the deployment of arguments which invoke efficiency in extracting specified cs as grounds for adopting given technologies, against recourse, often indispensable, to practical performance, often under circumstances in which one person's performance must be coordinated with the performances of other people. Such circumstances are present in joint consumption: eating together, or sharing a trout stream. They reach farther, however, and are (I would think, trespassing again upon the domain of social science) most compelling toward convergence when the joint consumption depends on a joint technology, that is to say, a technology in which different people are assigned complementary roles and the characteristics sought are not fully extracted (or extracted at all) unless these roles are played with coordinated proficiency. Such technologies, highly evolved ones in the practice of sophisticated lovers and amateur string quartets, are (I would hold) very common in less evolved forms - for example, in the technologies of consumption which members of the public use to extract cs from basketball arenas, golf courses, art museums, theaters, and concert halls. Are not the highly evolved cases perhaps the best things to take as paradigms in seeking to appreciate the role of knowledge in aesthetic experience?5 (The case of one person contemplating a picture resulting from the practice of another may be the very worst.) The proficiency of each player in the quartet must meet standards laid down by the score and by the other players; and each player extracts cs in kinds and quantities depending on the degree to which all together meet those standards. In such cases, moreover, clearly whatever can be conveyed in language about the relevant skills in extracting cs is of secondary importance.6 The cs themselves may have no names, and fixing upon names for them may be more trouble than it is worth. Yet the reference in (T6) to communication is justified by the possibility, which there is no need to renounce forever anywhere, of finding names or descriptions that can serve in 'technical norms'7 and, given such vehicles, appear in practical arguments: 'If you want to obtain more q, then choose combination rak rather than m\! The ct in question may be a second or third or higher order characteristic. No doubt such arguments, communicated to people who have not yet practised the relevant technologies and experienced the cs to be

124 Moral Objectives extracted, are effective only as invitations to experiment. Their potential availability suggests, nevertheless, that a hierarchy of knowledge, theoretical as well as practical, lies at hand, which, fully explored, through all the cs of remoter levels, would unify all tastes and consolidate all preferences in one correct system. How seriously should this suggestion be taken? The consolidation is not imminent: if there were such a hierarchy, in most regions only its most superficial levels would now be in view; and nowhere would they have yet been fully explored or fully agreed upon. But there are good grounds for supposing that such a hierarchy does not exist and would not be either permanent or unique if it did exist. No limit can be set to innovations in technologies of consumption or to the variety of cs (at any level) yet to be discovered. More important it can hardly be assumed that there is just one way of specifying the cs which are to figure at the various levels of the hierarchy. Some such cs can be constructed ad hoc for purposes of promoting convergence in particular preferences closer to the surface than preferences for them; but alternative categories might have worked for these purposes just as well, or worked better in coordinating cs in these regions with other cs at the same level. Even what cs are to be assigned to what levels remains an open question, attended (one would think) with many options. It is perhaps a weakness of Lancaster's approach, considered as an attempt to describe consumers' choices, that he requires us to make a beginning on such questions, leaving behind the familiar (though not entirely unproblematical) categories of goods which economists ordinarily take as given in the market. However, it is not a weakness that blocks piecemeal success with explanations invoking cs as well as gs. Moreover, from a philosophical view, it is not a weakness at all, if it helps redress on the side of diversity the balance to be struck with tendencies to convergence. These tendencies remain so far potential that apart from education in the arts (which many do not pursue and no one pursues comprehensively) they are for the most part not carried further than to bring about agreement on specific policies, where it is inconvenient to allow people to agree to disagree by pursuing different lifestyles. Hence, (T8) Convergence of tastes (beyond existing convergence) is more a matter of constructible foundations than of foundations already constructed; and incentives do not exist for carrying the project of construction to any unique completion (even if it is supposed feasible to do so).

From Economics to Aesthetics 125 There is another factor operating against the unification of tastes, which I have left to last, because it properly comes last, as an epistemologically minor qualification to theses about the rectification of preferences, rather than first, as an empirically formidable obstacle to bringing any such theses forth: people differ, and will continue to differ, in appetites because they differ in temperaments. Such differences in preferences are irreducible, if temperaments are taken as unchangeable, by any techniques of rectification. Do they, however, detract from opportunities to rectify preferences by increasing shared knowledge any more than variations in sensory capacity detract from opportunities to rectify beliefs about the properties of physical objects?8 Note, 1998 Since this article came out, Amartya Sen, among others, with his famous essay on 'Rational Fools/ Philosophy and Public Affairs, VI4 (Summer 1977,317-44), has made the startling narrowness of the economists' standard theory of consumer behavior familiar. Yet I think this article may still be distinctive to a degree for the two linked arguments, first, that even resort to a second level in the hierarchy of preferences - Lancaster's level of 'characteristics' - fails to capture all the grounds commonly invoked in rectifying preferences; and, second, that though those grounds may be hard to articulate in any definite way, they can be effective, nonetheless, and effective as matters of knowledge. Grounds for rectifying preferences at higher levels than the second one, including grounds hard to articulate, will come into the evaluation of life plans. So they have an important part to play in deciding how to live well. Some of them, moreover, may not only escape the economists working at the first and second levels; they may imply life plans pretty thoroughly at odds with market considerations, as the fable about ants and grasshoppers that follows aims to show.

Notes 1 Originated by Samuelson in papers foreshadowing Paul A. Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947); further developed in J.R. Hicks, A Revision of Demand Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, reprinted with minor revisions, 1959), and I.M.D. Little, A Critique of Welfare Economics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). A standard exposition can he found in Kelvin Lancaster, Introduction to Modern Microeconomics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), chap. 7. For generalization of

126 Moral Objectives

2 3 4

5

6 7 8

consumers' preference orderings beyond traditional assumptions about nonsatiation, see V.C. Walsh, Introduction to Contemporary Microeconomics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). In Lancaster, Introduction to Modern Microeconomics, chap. 7. Kelvin Lancaster, Consumer Demand: A New Approach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), and in papers foreshadowing this book. My use of 'technology of consumption' differs from Lancaster's in not implying that all goods and characteristics are covered by the one current technology and in allowing for variations between technologies in efficiency of technique. Analysis could proceed readily from such paradigms to discuss the joint technologies that link artists and spectators (often combined in one person), as discussed (in effect) in Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 94,105ff. Ibid., 97. G.H. von Wright, Norm and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 9-11. A large number of people, at various universities in Canada, the United States, England, and France, have heard me discuss the present subject or have read my written treatments of it. Much or most of the progress, great or little, that I have made on the subject is due to them and their criticisms, and I am properly grateful.

7

Preferences Opposed to the Market: Grasshoppers vs Ants on Security, Inequality, and Justice

'Vous chantiez? j'en suis fort aise. / En bien! dansez maintenant/ That's what the Ant said, when she refused the Grasshopper a loan to tide her over the winter. La Fontaine's fable, however, is told from the Ant's point of view. It expresses the scorn of the industrious possessive individualist for relatively improvident people who do not take pains to accumulate capital. Admittedly, the Grasshopper is not a good business risk; and in spite of the animus in the manner of the refusal, it is on basic market principles that the Ant refuses to make the loan. Would it have been different if the Grasshopper had made an effort to accumulate comparable to the Ant's, but had run into a bit of bad luck fields flooded at harvest time; a barn struck by lightning? No doubt the Grasshopper's promise to repay next year would then have seemed more reliable. At some rate of interest the Ant might have found the risk of lending worth taking. I think, however, that a Grasshopper who was not anywhere near as committed to accumulation as the Ant might have something rational to say for herself, beginning (and ending) with the protest that Ants are very hard to live with. The Grasshopper might say - might she not? that singing and dancing were more important than acquiring property. 'No doubt,' she might concede, 'it is important to make provisions for the winter, even provisions for bigger crops next summer. So not everybody can do nothing but sing all summer long; it's only fair that everybody should in fact do his part to provide. But there should be as much Reprinted from Social Philosophy and Policy, 2 (Autumn 1984), 101-14. Copyright © 1984 by Social Philosophy and Policy. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

128 Moral Objectives singing and dancing as possible for everybody who wants them. Let's be provident enough to make sure that with everybody doing his part together we save enough to cover everybody's needs through the winter. That will mean that each of us will have to aim at saving a little more than what each needs, to allow for disasters that prevent some of us from saving as much. Let's all be provident to this degree; and spend the rest of the time enjoying life.' The Ant will want to be yet more provident, maybe to the extent of leading a rigorously frugal life, maybe with due allowance for modest bourgeois comforts. Should she not be allowed to be? Moreover, even if, as I have been implicitly assuming, there will be plenty of time left over for singing and dancing once reasonable provisions for the winter have been undertaken the Grasshopper hasn't yet said how much she wants to do about economic growth. Will she agree to cut down the singing and dancing a lot to provide for growth? Perhaps; but perhaps not. I shall not try to speak for her on this point. I shall say this: Whatever provision she is willing, as a moderately provident person, to make for hard times or for growth, she can rationally object to providing for these things through the market. In particular, she can object to allowing the Ant to accumulate as freely as the market and uncircumscribed private property will allow her to. But Grasshoppers have other grounds for objecting to the market, especially to a market in which Ants are present; and so if they have the choice, they may choose not to have a market. If they are to live in the same society with Ants, this inclination deserves at least as much weight, person by person, as the inclination of Ants, which I shall assume is opposed, and favours the market. Even if the Grasshoppers go apart, to form their own joyous society, the Ants will create trouble for them. Finally, the Ants will create trouble for themselves if they do not take some of the same precautions that the Grasshoppers are concerned with. The Grasshoppers' objections to the market might come up at any time. I shall treat them as coming up at the foundation or refoundation of society on rational terms, under some hypothetical construction congenial to social contract theorists. I do so without endorsing any of the programs adopted in social contract theory. On the other hand, I do so as one who has found them more congenial than theories that begin with sacrosanct a priori entitlements, and especially illuminating - in success or failure - on the extent to which rational self-interest can serve as the foundation of ethics. My special target in this paper is the inclination of some contract theorists (notably, David Gauthier) to hold that the

Preferences Opposed to the Market 129 market would beyond question be accepted by rational contracting agents as the most suitable means of producing and distributing private goods.1 Gauthier is inclined to think that given accepted initial factor endowments the market is beyond question in respect to justice or other moral considerations: no moral issue arises from the operation of the market. Other philosophers (notably, Robert Nozick) supply me with a secondary target in being inclined, with or without any reference to the social contract, to think that transactions in the market are a prototype of justice: provided the goods exchanged were rightly held to begin with, whatever comes about through a fair exchange is just.2 I think this, too, is highly doubtful; but even if it were true, it would not rule out grounds that rational agents might have for apprehending from the operation of the market, including fair exchanges, dangers to justice and dangers to other good things as well. The dangers to justice include the danger of imposing market arrangements on people whose preferences at bottom disfavour having a market. How can those preferences be disregarded in favour of contrary preferences without prejudice - without unjustifiably discriminating against Grasshoppers in the provision of things valued? If, as a species of injustice, this looks a bit recherche, it is only because the issue is commonly settled without attention, by prejudice. Grasshoppers do really have to be reckoned with; there are in fact many of them among us. The market that the Grasshoppers would have grounds to reject might be the perfect competitive market - the ideal market, the market in which a welfare optimum (of sorts) is guaranteed as an equilibrium solution. In an attempt to redress the balance of value-laden terms employed on this subject, I shall call it the fantasy market. It assumes that the technology available is given and unchanging; that every product and every factor of production can be assigned to a sizeable homogeneous class; that no seller or buyer is large enough to affect by his actions alone the prices of products or factors in any class, or even large enough to affect prices by any feasible coalition of sellers or buyers; that all products and all factors are equally available for sale or purchase everywhere in the market; that labour and capital at least are perfectly mobile; and finally (though this assumption has been known to give special trouble), that all agents are perfectly informed (as well as being perfectly rational). What could Grasshoppers object to in that? They might object that they cannot bring home important real-world objections to it, just

130 Moral Objectives because it is a fantasy that, very conveniently for ideological purposes, deliberately sets aside a host of real-world considerations. One might take the fantasy market as offering an instantaneous recipe for the composition and distribution of output. Given an initial distribution of factor endowments accepted as just or accepted as unchangeable, and given the preference maps of all agents, the fantasy market arrives at once at a Pareto-optimal solution, in which the Grasshoppers' greater taste for leisure is nicely balanced against the Ants' greater preference for other goods. Don't the Grasshoppers do as well, given their tastes, vis-a-vis the Ants as they could reasonably expect to? The Grasshoppers might wonder, even so, whether their preferences for goods other than leisure might not be ill-assorted with the Ants', so that after supplying the Ants with frankfurters, rubber bread, and Cold Duck few factor units would be left over to work at high marginal costs on the Grasshoppers' behalf producing milk-fed veal, stone-ground flour, and Pinot Chardonnay. Even with instantaneous optima, one might wish to take some precautions about what sorts of people one is going to have optima with. However, I shall not press this point here, since I have said nothing about the Ants' tastes, except as regards leisure; and it is the Ants' unremitting industry and inclination to accumulate property that I am specially concerned with. With the least shift away from an instantaneous solution, real-world objections to the market start up. Suppose that though it is to operate in many respects costlessly, the fantasy market does, nevertheless, take some time to reach the optimum. Then, if the Grasshoppers put some value on having goods produced and supplied in a spirit of brotherly of brotherly-and-sisterly - love, they might now object to the unlimited scope (apart from force and fraud) given by market arrangements for the pursuit of self-interest. They might accept the market solution, as best answering to the preferences of all concerned, but they would want it arrived at in a different way, as an expression of communal concern and planning (Malinvaud, Milleron).3 I shall not press this objection either, or follow it up when I turn from the fantasy market, modified in one particular or another, to the market in the real world. Grasshoppers filled with brotherly-and-sisterly love would find narrowly rational, self-interested Ants even harder to get along with than narrowly rational, self-interested Grasshoppers would, but the latter have objections enough, and it is they that I have in mind - Grasshoppers who each of them relish singing and dancing just because of the pleasure that they themselves take in such things.

Preferences Opposed to the Market 131 The next step, still within the realm of fantasy, away from the instantaneous solution towards the real-world market might be to introduce changes in technology, delivered as a series of exogenous shocks. After each shock, the market would operate again to bring about a Paretooptimal solution, but it would not, except by a miraculous coincidence, be a Pareto-optimal solution as much to everybody's liking as the one arrived at in the previous period. The Grasshoppers in particular might prefer not to have their positions continually unsettled by the shocks, with the attendant risks of losing out as a result. They might prefer to keep the introduction of technology under communal control and minimize the shocks that it might cause. If the fantasy market is to be so far modified as to operate in a succession of periods, we might consider introducing savings. The Ants will save; the Grasshoppers, beyond a minimum, will not. Translated into factor endowments (land, capital goods), the Ants' savings will bring them to the beginning of each successive period with ever larger possessions. Thus, at the beginning of any later period the distribution of factor endowments may be skewed away from what was accepted as a just distribution at the beginning of the first. Even so, while competition continues, as the fantasy assumes, the Grasshoppers, if they have the prudence not to multiply, may be steadily better off. They may have skills - maybe their very skills in singing and dancing - that the Ants' accumulation of labour-saving machinery cannot easily supersede. If the Ants - or the Ants' wives - are ready to pay a premium for the public exercise of those skills, the average Grasshopper might even do better than the average Ant, in spite of the latter's steadily growing opportunity to gain income from factors other than the labour that she has to offer. On the other hand, the Grasshoppers' chief marketable skills may be, like the weavers' trade, very susceptible to supersession by the Ants' capital goods.4 Even if, given general economic expansion with no increase in the labour force, the Grasshoppers' wages rise, the Ants' incomes are likely to rise even more; so the Ants will steadily acquire better and yet better positions for outbidding the Grasshoppers for scarce goods. They will appropriate the ocean beaches; Grasshoppers, 'nymphs and shepherds dance no more / By sandy Ladon's lilied banks.' Imprudent in this respect at least, the Grasshoppers may multiply. All that singing and dancing is likely to come to something. In that case, they may individually get no benefit at all from the increased amounts of the other factors, and even become worse off as time passes. As

132 Moral Objectives rational, self-interested agents, the Grasshoppers of any one generation may not suffer enough from such consequences to offset in their eyes the pleasures of procreation and family life. Grasshoppers in later generations may, however, find their impoverished condition objectionable, and all the more objectionable because it was not of their own making, or of the making of the Ants contemporary with them. Grasshoppers of any generation might well become too impatient at this juncture with the fantasy market to continue discussing it. Once the possibility of increasingly unequal accumulations of property had been brought in, they might insist that to get any real sense of the significance of such accumulations the talk of the fantasy market has to be abandoned in favour of coming to grips with the real market. I shall take this advice. The first thing to be said about the real market is that it coexists with other possibilities of social interaction. Even were the market to remain competitive - that is to say, free of any monopolistic or monopsonistic developments - while the Ants accumulate ever larger amounts of property, those holdings would pose a danger to the Grasshoppers. The Ants will be able to oppress the Grasshoppers, by hiring hit men or by harassment in the courts, and in other ways. This danger will be compounded by lapses from competition. The Ants will be able not only to outbid the Grasshoppers for goods that become scarcer over the whole market. They will, in individual bargains struck with the Grasshoppers, have more bargaining power - more chance to wait the Grasshoppers out. So that bargaining - a feature of real markets that vanishes in the fantasy market - will run steadily more in the Ants' favour than in the Grasshoppers'. Most terrible of all might be the effect of accumulation in the market for labour. There, in time, in one locality after another, single Ant capitalists or landlords or small coalitions of capitalists and landlords will face relatively large masses of workers - more workers than there are jobs available. In such circumstances, the greater bargaining power of the Ants may enable them to drive the wages of the Grasshoppers at least temporarily below the long-run natural or subsistence rate of wages that would be established were the market fully competitive over all localities taken together. Sometimes things have worked out this way; sometimes, of course, they have worked out very differently. In favourable circumstances, gross and growing inequalities in property have been consistent with staggering increases all-around in the material standard of living, not only in trinkets, but also in fundamental matters like sanitation, nutrition, and medical care. But the Grasshoppers might be indifferent to

Preferences Opposed to the Market 133 some components of this standard of living, opposed to the industrial discipline that had been required to achieve it, and prepared to try other arrangements to capture the material goods that they most valued. Besides, they might not agree that either the oppression or the risk of oppression which comes hand in hand with unequal property has vanished during the extraordinary, intermittent, worldwide boom of the last two centuries. They might not accept that experience as empirical proof either of the inherent virtues of the market or of its capacity to escape the dangers of the differential accumulation of property. I am not saying that accumulation of property - or, more generally, of control over the means of production - and its concentration in the hands of an elite occur in the market alone; or that processes contrary to accumulation shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves - do not to some extent offset it. The market, nevertheless, licenses differential accumulation without limit; and the Grasshoppers have reason to refuse that licence to any social arrangement. It is true that during the last two hundred years market societies in the West have been able to tolerate enormous disparities in riches without much direct personal oppression. Millionaires in Canada or the United States cannot openly get away with having people that they object to beaten up on the street, as a displeased nobleman could deal with Voltaire. The inequality of power is exerted instead in adjustments to the tax system and to other governmental policies; and, on occasion, in personal conflicts, in having easier access to the courts and ampler use of them. There are small claims courts; but if their judgments can be appealed, as they can be in Nova Scotia, does not the party with more money still have the advantage? Moreover, in the contracting position, Grasshoppers like other agents must take a long view. (John Rawls says that the contract is to hold 'in perpetuity.'5) Sooner or later, will not unchecked inequalities of wealth lead to a division between an irresponsible patrician class and an oppressed and demoralized plebs? For two hundred years the rich, secure in their power, and growing ever richer, could easily afford to let the less rich become, cyclically, more comfortable. What happens when the boom stops permanently, or becomes ever harder to resume and ever more fitful? Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, which until recently were civilized, even progressive countries, may show us what happens. Is it perverse of the Grasshoppers to choose not to run these dangers? Grasshoppers, in the primordial contracting position, may be assumed to have all the latest deliverances of economic theory, together

134 Moral Objectives with the prescriptions for economic policy to be inferred from them. Yet they may have some doubts - may they not? - as to whether it has yet been made clear how a market economy can accommodate technological change without laying whole regions waste, like the obsolete and deindustrialized near-Middle-West of this Continent, including Ontario. They may have some doubts, too, as to whether economists have yet perfected their advice as to how a market economy is to avoid long periods of cyclical unemployment. Moreover, even if sound and comprehensive advice regarding cycles or technological change were forthcoming, Grasshoppers, from their knowledge of political science, might doubt whether the advice is going to be taken. To choose the market, therefore, may well look to Grasshoppers like a choice attended with severe drawbacks in protracted unemployment and underemployment of resources, human and material. Almost as bad, in the Grasshoppers' view, might be the competitive pressures accompanying continued employment under technological changes or the forced mobility that is a condition of continued employment. Moreover, the Grasshoppers may refuse to make the easy assumption taken for granted by the economists and politicians who preside over the periodic shutting-down of Canada and other countries, that in the long run everybody will benefit more from technological change, from domestic booms, and from restored international trade than he may lose from unemployment. Could this be proved in conformity with the Pareto welfare criterion, applied to people's overall preferences for one life plan against another? Merely showing that a greater dollar-volume of output is generated over whole cycles or whole generations would not show this, even if the index problems afflicting such comparisons are disregarded. Moreover, the dollar measures, with or without the index problems mastered, will not include any serious estimate of the suffering, humiliation, and demoralization that millions of people experience during protracted unemployment. A rational Grasshopper might prefer to opt out of the market far enough to avoid them, whatever abundance of fast foods and trinkets she would have to forego thereby. For further objections, the Grasshoppers could put forward the long list of discrepancies between the fantasy market and the real market that Frank Knight assembled in his classic critique of the ethics of competition.6 The list particularizes the effects of various rigidities, barriers, and lapses of rationality. Some are related, of course, to monopolistic aspects of real markets; the Grasshoppers would not fail to make the point that with distinctiveness of products, talents, and locations monopoly is

Preferences Opposed to the Market 135 unavoidable in the real world, so far making the fantasy market irrelevant. The Grasshoppers would also press the point that in the real world externalities are found everywhere; or at any rate they would press this point, if they were not assured, as some social contract theorists would assure them, that externalities both negative and positive were going to be taken care of separately, by other arrangements. They would, notwithstanding, have more misgivings about this assurance, the more broadly the term 'externalities' is being used. If it is to be used to include all the good and bad things not automatically provided for in market transactions, including oppression, technological shocks, and business cycles, a sceptical Grasshopper will demand details. For Grasshoppers, provisions respecting these things will be among the most important features of the social contract. If the term 'externalities' is to be used more narrowly, embracing on the negative side only costs of production not borne by the producers or consumers of a given product, the Grasshoppers will be quick to point out that taking care of them will go only a short distance toward answering their objections to the real market. There is at least one more objection that the Grasshoppers might make. They might object to the effects of the market on the characters of the participants. I have, by confining myself to self-interested Grasshoppers, forfeited the chance of putting in their mouths the morally most telling version of this objection. It is, again, that the market encourages action from narrow self-interest alone, and that in the real world the unremitting pursuit of self-interest is likely to spread out from the market to infect personal relations and civic obligations. Thus, on the one hand, the rich press for tax concessions in the name of incentives to investment, and obtain what the less rich perceive as loopholes not available to them. Were they less self-interested, would the less rich not still have some excuse, in the injustice of the tax system, to refuse to cooperate with it? But, thoroughly inculcated in the motives of the market, they are self-interested, too: evading taxes is their way of getting theirs. Even self-interested Grasshoppers will have a version of the objection about personal character to put forward. The Grasshoppers may fear that their characters, with which they may be quite pleased, will be transformed by taking part with the Ants in a market.7 Competing with the Ants for success in the market, or just survival, they may become more and more like the Ants, losing among other things their taste for singing and dancing. But the Grasshoppers may consider that taste well

136 Moral Objectives founded, and they may not relish the change of character that would destroy it. The objections that I have had the Grasshoppers raise are all, it might be said, familiar. I'm not sure they are. They have certainly all been raised before by Marx, Kropotkin, Tawney, and others; they even reflect aspects of the practice, or attempts at practice, of real social groups, some of them - the Amish, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, one-farm communes, and collectives - continuing today. The objections seem, however, to have dropped out of sight among some of our leading social theorists. Perhaps, they have done so because it is difficult to find a place for them in economic thinking. Economic thinking finds it convenient to focus on mixes of goods, demanded without regard for the mode of producing them and without reflection on the origins and contexts of putting values on them. It also treats every good as interchangeable on the margin with every other. If the Grasshoppers are offered a sufficiently rich mixture of goods with the market, how could they rationally be content with the mixture that they will be left with on rejecting the market? There is some tendency among enthusiasts for the market, of course, to try to have the market both ways: perfect, so that all the good things said in the fantasy can be said about it; but also an untrammelled opportunity for self-enrichment. Yet some possessive individualists frankly support the real market rather than the fantasy - laissez-faire, with changing technology, and no limitation either on fair exchange of rightfully acquired goods or on accumulation, short of the Lockean proviso,8 which is determinate to the point only of operating to prevent the complete engrossment of vital necessities. In the discussion of any original contract, Grasshoppers may properly raise objections about the real market. Is it not the one that in the end they are being invited, more likely than not, to practice? Furthermore, though it is a point that I shall simply note in passing, it is not logically beyond question that with the market a richer mixture of material goods on any specified list, even a richer mixture of material goods and various specified services, is sure to be obtained. I shall let the question pass, because it is not an essential issue here. Even if doing without the market implies a lower material standard of living, the Grasshoppers may, for the reasons that I have reviewed, prefer to do without it, or to accept it only in a very circumscribed form. Such preferences, whether or not they fall in with the assumptions of economic thinking, deserve as much attention as any others. Economists, in fact,

Preferences Opposed to the Market 137 make a good deal of fuss about systematically abstaining from asking for the reasons for preferences; so they could not justify setting aside these, even if they came without reasons. Coming with reasons, they should give pause even to social theorists who are working perhaps with a notion of rationality full enough to call for reasons and who are ready in any case to have agents ascribe utility to goods not exchanged not exchangeable - in the market. What impact will the Grasshoppers' objections have upon the process of arriving at a social contract? More particularly, what impact will they have on contractual discussions between Grasshoppers and Ants? I shall assume that if the Grasshoppers were to do the deciding, they could arrange to have a society that would do at least modestly well without a market. Either they are wise enough (with the present resources of social science at their disposal) to avoid letting the population grow too rapidly and avoid any other development that might make spending some centuries in a market society the only route out of the kingdom of necessity. Or they would have the resources of presentday society and the same choice of technologies and so be able to refound a society on terms that assure it of a modest standard of living without a market. The Grasshoppers might, nevertheless, want to have the Ants in the same society - not in disinterested hopes of humanizing them, but because it would be dangerous to leave the Ants outside. To some extent the Grasshoppers might feel that the increased availability of some trinkets and gadgets was partial compensation for conceding the market some room to operate. Moreover, though they would know of many instances in which nonmarket arrangements had worked very well, they would have to concede that so far, even the largest of them - some monasteries in the Middle Ages, some tribal societies, the Oneida Community - had come nowhere near demonstrating how such a thing as segmental communalism could work on the scale of a modern nationstate. Organizing on such a scale, if such organizing was unavoidable, the Grasshoppers might be ready to show some sober respect for the market as a sensitive device for registering and aggregating preferences even in relatively important matters. They would have to concede, too, as I have already acknowledged, that some of the points that worried them most, in particular the differential accumulation of property and power, occur in nonmarket societies as well as in societies with unchecked markets. So the Grasshoppers might be willing to bargain about accepting

138 Moral Objectives greater or lesser use of the market. The Ants, for their part, putting aside any desire on their part to improve the Grasshoppers' moral character by converting them to the spirit of capitalism, might be ready to bargain with the Grasshoppers because they, too, saw advantages in a larger society, including the possibility of a more extensive market. One form of compromise might be to let the market operate for some goods and services and not for others. Even a Grasshopper, comparing the prices and offerings of state and provincial liquor commissions with the prices and goods available in Florida, California, Minnesota, and other jurisdictions in which business in wine and liquor is left to competitive private enterprise, might prefer the market for these things. Other possibilities would be restaurants, food, clothing, and furniture, though the advantages of catering to individual tastes in these last two connections might be offset by the disadvantages of arbitrary fashion changes. Another form of compromise - which might be combined with the first one - would be to adopt various measures to correct for the misadventures of the market: factory legislation, food and drug inspection, workers' compensation, anti-trust action, social security, a drastic and unavoidable tax on inheritances, and, if one could be found, an effective countercyclical policy. Combined, these forms of compromise seem to come out resembling at least roughly what we have got in late capitalism and the welfare state. One may infer that our present arrangements can be looked upon not merely as incorporating a series of remedies for various failures of the market to meet human needs. They can also be looked upon as the result of a hypothetical social contract between enthusiasts for the market and people who, very different in their basic preferences, find the market something acceptable, if at all, only for limited uses, subordinated to certain stringent conditions. It is common practice in certain quarters to portray the mixed economy and the welfare state as something imposed unjustly upon productive people by unproductive ones disobligingly denominated 'free riders' and 'parasites.' Due attention to the Grasshoppers' position shows, however, that these things might result from a compromise that did some justice both to champions of the market and to opponents of the market who are yet prepared in their own way to be productive and in particular to put forward their share of social effort. Perhaps, however, what we have got is at once too much of the market for Grasshoppers and not enough of it for Ants. If they could, would

Preferences Opposed to the Market 139 not they be better off parting company, the Grasshoppers to establish some sort of communal economy, with limited use of the market if any use at all, the Ants to a roaring market with no holds short of force and fraud barred? Let us assume that enough other Grasshoppers and enough other Ants turn up to make each society large enough to be viable, at least at the outset. Alas! The Grasshoppers cannot escape all the difficulties of living with Ants and with the market by setting up on their own. The Grasshoppers may prefer to sacrifice substantial amounts of output in order to have more leisure, more time for singing and dancing; they may prefer to develop technology very slowly, bringing in innovations only on terms that avoid disrupting people's lives. If the Ants meanwhile go all out for output and rapid technological development, they will soon overshadow the Grasshoppers in potential military strength. I am not saying that only a market society would pose such a danger for the Grasshoppers. The Golden Horde was not a market society; nor are the countries whose aggressiveness is most denounced in our press: North Korea, Viet Nam under its present regime, the Soviet Union. We might, however, recall that market societies have been extremely aggressive in opening up markets abroad and forcing trade and development upon countries that did not especially want them. Remember the opium wars waged by Britain against China, in the name of free trade; the warships that carried Perry's demands to Japan; the parcelling out of Africa in the nineteenth century; the pacification of the Philippines, resisting co-prosperity with the United States, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos dead;9 the actions of the United States in the last quarter of a century in Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I grant that more than the expansion of markets was and is at issue in many of these cases; my point is that there is enough force in all of them taken together to give the Grasshoppers genuine reasons for fearing aggression from the Ants. They could not but be a bit uneasy living side by side with all that power, anyway. Must the Grasshoppers then agree to give high priority in their affairs, if not to the market and technology of all sorts, at least to military technology and their defence budget? Can they have what they want in one country? But there is another possibility. Maybe it is not entirely hopeless for Grasshoppers to look to Ants for help, once the Ants - most Ants - realize what is at stake for them. For Ants, too, have something to fear in the cumulative inequalities that the unchecked market will generate, and something to lose from the other aspects of the market to

140 Moral Objectives which Grasshoppers object. Most of the Ants must expect to be left eventually far back in the pack; and though they may gain enough to make their comfort secure if they can keep it, small Ants are always liable to be driven out of business by large Ants. Indeed, the real market jeopardizes in time the very thing that Ants and their theorists most prize - free and fair exchange. Inequalities in wealth may lead to aggrandizements outside the market, as when the rich arrange to have the government modify the terms of trade in their favour, or even transfer more wealth directly to them, or as when, more nakedly, various sorts of direct intimidation are practised, within or without the law, to seize assets and opportunities. Even if the rich continue to respect the rules of the market, however, the bargains in which they enter with others - with less successful Ants - will reflect their superior bargaining power, and will be specially to their advantage for that reason. The fantasy market, of course, as I have said, has no place for any process of bargaining. The champions of fair exchange and of the market might, however, have expected to have thought more fully about what was required to keep the process fair for all participants. It is true, even with very great differences in bargaining power, the bargain struck may be in the end beneficial to both parties and in a sense voluntary. Such, as Hobbes insisted, is the bargain struck between a bandit and the man whose life he spares.10 So the less successful Ants may be interested after all in measures that keep the operation of the market within limits. Indeed, all Ants, asked to make choices in this connection while they are drawing up a social contract, may be interested in such measures. They will know from reading Lester Thurow that the best explanation of success in the market, the sort of success embodied in acquiring within one's lifetime a disproportionately large personal fortune, is a random walk process.11 Even Ants as confident of their powers of acquisition as any Ants could be must rationally recognize that things may go wrong for them, so that with James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock they would be interested in hav10 ing some measures of social insurance against personal disasters. Will the measures that the Ants are interested in to limit the market be in variety and scope enough like the provisions that the Grasshoppers want to make for themselves apart from the market to encourage both parties to reconsider the project of joining in the foundation or refoundation of one society? I do not have a quick answer to that question; but I think that a social contract theory, recast to allow for preferences opposed to the market as well as preferences enthusiastically favouring

Preferences Opposed to the Market 141 one, might, on exploring the question, come upon a basis for compromise in which even were the grounds, considered earlier, favouring a joint society with a mixed economy, not to operate or not to suffice, compelling grounds for both parties could still be found. The Grasshoppers would have a ground for conceding something to the Ants so as to forestall the Ants from living apart and advancing far beyond them in technology and power. The Ants would have a ground for conceding something to the Grasshoppers in order to have them present, in the same society, as additional support for measures to check the market, and also, possibly, in the institutions that the Grasshoppers set up, as an added source of stability for the economy. Those institutions - consumers' cooperatives, producers' cooperatives safeguarded against monopolistic tendencies, communes, perhaps tiers of segmental communalism - might be less cyclical in initiatives and less subject to cyclical forces from outside. Of course, they might be these things at the expense of a much less rapid development of technology, as well as of less rapid and less massive capital accumulation. The jointly supported measures for checking the market - anti-trust, reduction of inheritance, redistribution of income - would tend the same way. Both Ants and Grasshoppers, however, might well be willing to pay these costs; and if this is so, there is a basis for far-reaching compromise between them, and thus a basis for thinking that social contract theory can cope with agents as diverse as Grasshoppers and Ants in one contract, though it is going to have to be much more guarded about accepting the market than some theorists have yet allowed, and much more specific in its implications regarding a mix of market and nonmarket arrangements.13 Notes 1 -David Gauthier, 'Justified Inequality?' Dialogue, 21(3) (1982), 431-43, at 433. 2 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 151. 3 J.C. Milleron, Theory of Value with Public Goods/ Journal of Economic Theory, 5(3) (1972), 419-77 (which draws on work by Malinvaud). 4 In this passage, I am responding to some illuminating comments by Sheldon Wein on the Grasshoppers' competitive position when the Ants acquire capital. 5 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 131. 6 Frank Knight, The Ethics of Competition/ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 37

142 Moral Objectives

7 8

9

10 11 12 13

(1923), 579-624; reprinted in The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935). This is a point that I owe to Sheldon Wein. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 177ft. Nozick leaves the proviso otherwise indeterminate when he sets aside (177) the task of relating a 'base line' to 'original appropriation' (itself a dubious notion). An American general, in the course of defending the pacification, estimated 616,000 dead in Luzon alone - one-sixth of the population - by May 1901. Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972), 231. This estimate has appeared exaggerated to others, including some severe critics of the pacification. Leon Wolff, in Little Brown Brother (1961), claims 250,000 dead all told, including 16,000 counted as killed in action by the United States Army, plus 20,000 killed but not counted, plus 200,000 civilians dead of famine and pestilence. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, chap. 14. Lester C. Thurow, Generating Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 149-54. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 192-3. Delivered at a conference on Philosophy, Economics, and Justice held by the University of Waterloo, 20-2 May 1983.1 wish to thank Alastair Sinclair, Lanning Sowden, and Sheldon Wein for helpful comments on a preliminary draft. I am also obliged to Jeffrey Paul, who served as the commentator on the paper at Waterloo. I have made a number of additions, responding to his points. Bernard Suits's book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) has given a Grasshopper grounds for claiming to be the genius loci at Waterloo, but my Grasshopper and her kin are more humdrum characters.

JUSTICE AND THE COMMON GOOD

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8

Liberalism, Statistics, and the Presuppositions of Utilitarianism

Liberalism and utilitarianism are commonly at odds nowadays, chiefly because people commonly think that utilitarianism does not give persons and personal autonomy the respect that liberalism holds to be their due. On a historical view, however, is not there something more than a little puzzling about the existence of this conflict? Historically, liberalism and utilitarianism have been at times allies; nor was the alliance always ad hoc and peripheral. The most famous liberal of them all, John Stuart Mill, also has a claim to be as famous a utilitarian as anybody. Unless we suppose that he did not have the presence of mind to detect what nowadays seems a radical and obvious conflict between the two lines of thought, we have a historical puzzle on our hands. Was either his conception of liberalism or his conception of utilitarianism different from the conception current with us? I shall argue that it suffices to remove the puzzle to ascribe to him a difference in the conception of utilitarianism held both by its best-remembered advocates and by its critics in the century and a quarter of discussion that began with the publication of Bentham's Principles and ended with the publication of the last edition of Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics in his lifetime. Nor is this a point of narrow historical interest: It ramifies, through a deeper understanding of the project of the felicific calculus, into the connection, a feature of modern statecraft developing since Bentham first broached the project, between the systematic use of statistics and the choice of social policies. Moreover, appreciating the point helps us understand how utilitarianism has been misconceived since Sidgwick's time, and how the errors of particular concern to liberals can be remedied. Hitherto unpublished.

146 Moral Objectives A way back to the historical conception of utilitarianism begins with some doubts about the embarrassments nowadays attributed to utiliarianism. Let us look again, with new observations to make, at a case now notorious among philosophers: A surgeon has five patients who will die unless they are provided with certain essential bodily parts. A young man has just come in for his yearly check-up, and his parts will do: the surgeon can cut him up and transplant his parts among the five who need them. The surgeon asks the young man if he is willing to volunteer his parts, and thus his life; the young man says, 'Sorry, I deeply sympathize with your five patients but no/ Would it be morally permissible for the surgeon to proceed anyway? Hardly!

Treating this example in the 'Afterword' to the collection of her essays Rights, Restitution, & Risk,1 Judith Jarvis Thomson contends that 'Hedonic Act Utilitarianism/ if it does not come to the wrong conclusion about the example, will be embarrassed to say why the right conclusion is to spare the young man's life. The best that HAU can do, she thinks, is argue that relations between doctors and patients would be so unsettled if the cannibalization goes through that more happiness on balance will be produced by refraining from it. The surgeon's being able to proceed in secret would require HAU to produce another argument. Thomson does not press home the attack with this variation of the example, since she thinks it is embarrassment enough for HAU to be found arguing, with the example unvaried, against proceeding merely from the overall balance of happiness. That/ she says, locates the moral source of the prohibition on proceeding in the wrong place/ In another famous life-sacrificing case, Bernard Williams's military brute in the tropics - an army captain, whom I shall call El Capitan Sanguinario - threatens to kill twenty Indian prisoners unless you do him (and nineteen of them) the favor of killing the twentieth.2 Williams might tell you that you would be right to go ahead;3 but he considers it an unsettling objection to utilitarianism that it would tell you so without further ado. If utilitarianism should advise going ahead with medical cannibalization would he not think utilitarianism entirely outrageous? I Prescriptions of life-sacrifices? It is possible to invent a doctrine called 'Hedonic Act Utilitarianism' with a feature that implies such advice, or tends to imply it (which is as far as Thomson carries the charge). Indeed, it is common practice to assume that utilitarianism is

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 147 just such a doctrine. However, one may doubt whether the historic doctrine set forth by Bentham, Mill, Edgeworth, and Sidgwick4 has such a feature. One way of making this point would be to say only that the historic doctrine - which I shall call Benthamite Utilitarianism (BU) - does not tell us what to do when we do not have the scores that it calls for, and hence does not tell us to sacrifice the life of the twentieth prisoner or to cut up the young man for his parts. Another way, which gives us a deeper answer for some cases, equally well supported by history, is to say that BU, as its historic champions understood it, tells us not to monkey with the scores by sacrificing anybody's life; and hence tells us not to go in for medical cannibalization in the case arising. Whether it, applied to the other example, not only does not tell us to sacrifice the twentieth prisoner, but actually tells us not to sacrifice her is more difficult to say, as I shall explain. Not one of the historic champions of utilitarianism mentioned treats a case like either of the two before us, though Mill and Sidgwick do mention with approval voluntary sacrifices. None of them treat any case that allows us more of a ground for inferring prescriptions to take innocent lives than the omission of an explicit block to such an.inference. It is fair game, of course, to deduce from a principle as put forward untoward consequences that show the principle to have been inadequately formulated, and the authors in question certainly did not adequately formulate the principle that they were advocating. (Understanding counter-examples like those cited as directed against the inadequacy of the formulas I take them to be perfectly relevant and quite telling.) Given the silence of the historic authors mentioned on the topic, however, may it not be gratuitous to suppose that what they had in mind was a principle with a feature ready to sacrifice innocent lives? Moreover, it is not just silence that we have to go on; it is silence with a direction. Edgeworth, the most enthusiastic champion of the felicific calculus, marches right up to the point where life-sacrifices might be contemplated, and stops short. To give more means of happiness to people with larger capacities, Edgeworth is willing, in principle, to have those less favoured in capacity driven below the point of zero happiness; but he thinks it an empirical certainty that well before the starving point is reached 'the pleasures of the most favoured could not weigh much against the privations of the least favoured.'5 One may infer that he did not contemplate the privations being carried so far as to endanger the lives of the least favoured.6 Moreover, Edgeworth contemplates 'mitigating' the condition of the least favored class by having them emi-

148 Moral Objectives grate.7 No lives are sacrificed; the emigrants are happier than they were, or at least as happy; and if the home population is happier in the absence of their less capacious fellows, the score for the whole group, divided, will be greater than the score for the whole group undivided. There is a second argument, besides this directed silence, for thinking that BU did not contemplate taking innocent lives. We have from Mill's hand a systematic review of what he considered the serious objections to utilitarianism. The review does not mention the possibility of imposing life-sacrifices just to increase the happiness of other people.8 Nor, in a later review of the objections, does Sidgwick mention this possibility.9 Were they unaware of the objection? Or aware of it, did they choose to ignore it as too wide of the mark to be worth answering? If they had read Francis Hutcheson, and it is hard to believe that they had not, they would have encountered, endorsed there, policies that might invite the objection.10 They might have taken a passage in Godwin's Political Justice as endorsing such a policy. Godwin says, 'If the extraordinary case should occur in which I can promote the general good by my death more than by my life, justice requires that I should be content to die.'11 However, if they had read on they would have found this endorsement considerably qualified by Godwin's strong aversion to applying coercion contrary to any man's private judgment as to his duty,12 an aversion in this case not subject to the temporary exception that he allows of using coercion 'to prevent the inroad of universal violence and tumult/13 Taking these passages together, Godwin might have seemed to them to be doing no more in effect than allowing for the voluntary sacrifices that they approve, but treat as supererogatory.14 It would not have been possible to dismiss in this way the objection to involuntary sacrifices that they would have found starkly posed in the writings of Hazlitt, whom Schneewind cites as declaring that Bentham's calculus 'would warrant killing people to provide cadavers for medical students.'15 Did they not read Hazlitt on this point, or did they forget what they had read? Their omission to consider the objection is strong evidence that they were unaware of the objection at the time of writing the systematic reviews. Or, less plausibly, evidence that if they were aware of it, they thought it so absurd, compared with the objections that they did consider, as not to be worth bothering with. Unless one is ready to believe that both Mill and Sidgwick thought about the objection at the time of writing their reviews, but decided to suppress it as too embarrassing to their cherished views to circulate it further, we may reason-

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 149 ably conclude that neither Bentham nor Mill, nor Sidgwick and Edgeworth either, thought of the Greatest Happiness Principle as having a feature that led to the unwelcome possibility of imposing the objectionable sacrifices. Omission from the objections reviewed, taken together with the directed silence noted above, should deter us from ascribing to BU the life-sacrificing implication of HAU. But if we ask what can explain the curious omission of imposed life-sacrifices from Mill's systematic review, a third argument arises, more illuminating than the two just canvassed. It supports the suggestion that BU not only did not prescribe that lives be taken whenever doing so promotes group happiness; BU came, as its champions understood it, with a logical barrier to so prescribing. Let us suppose that all four champions rely on the felicific calculus to obtain and add up people's net happiness scores, and that they understand BU to prescribe one action or policy rather than another if and only if the action or policy has a higher total or average score (which give the same results in prescriptions for a fixed population).161 suggest that what best explains Mill's and Sidgwick's omission to treat objectionable life-sacrifices is that however inadequate, even indeterminate, may have been the conception of the Greatest Happiness Principle held by the champions mentioned, so far as they had a common conception, it carried over to the felicific calculus a feature of what I shall call Standard Group Scoring for Individual Traits (SGSIT). A basic feature of SGSIT is that it forbids sacrificing the lives of members of the groups in question (or otherwise putting them aside) in order to obtain a higher group score. Suppose you have charge of an orphanage inhabited by some thirty boys between 10 and 14 years of age. Perhaps there is some question about their nutrition and physical fitness, and this question would serve my purposes. Suppose, however, the most urgent task before you is to have the boys taught a trade, so that they can leave the orphanage and relieve the parish of the burden of sheltering and feeding them. It is decided that the boys will be taught the weavers' trade; at the end of a year they will be tested to see how much cloth they can weave in an hour. Won't you try to have all the boys learn to weave well enough to support themselves? SGSIT in this case will give a higher group score the higher the proportion of the boys who at the end of the year weave this well; in other sorts of cases, SGSIT might offer the alternative of raising the median score. (I shall not try to define SGSIT further except to say it

150 Moral Objectives accommodates this alternative, too. Further features may well include such things as not changing the measures used as one moves from scoring one person to scoring another and not combining the scores from one time for some people with the scores from another time for others. However, since we are dealing with a standard that we may suppose was at the beginning intuitive, perhaps entirely intuitive, rather than explicitly set forth, it seems historically appropriate to leave SGSIT largely undefined; and anyway for my present purposes I need make explicit only the features that I have mentioned.) Now, one way of getting a higher proportion of skillful weavers among the boys tested at the end of the year would be for you to kill the slower learners before the test comes. Would you expect full credit for the higher proportion in that case? Would an advocate of enhancing the skills of orphans, or of youth in general, have to spell out the point that the population to be tested, under SGSIT, is to be the same in composition as the population that you started out with? It would not be an appropriate measure, under SGSIT, of improvement in individual traits to take the total quantity of cloth woven by all the boys together during the hour of testing. The subject under test, one might say, would then shift from how skillful the boys had become as weavers to how much cloth they could weave all told. Bentham's felicific calculus, without, I think, Bentham's noticing, makes a similar change in subject, from making people happy (the people in a given group) to creating the greatest total happiness in a group, which was not then, anymore than it is now, even a notion, like the total amount of cloth, with a clear and familiar use.17 So there is, in respect to established usage, nothing like the conceptual opportunity offered by the notion of the total quantity of cloth. The calculus notwithstanding takes one step (as we shall see in a moment, Sidgwick took another) toward detaching the happiness to be sought from the happiness of the individual members of the group. Is it, however, a step that commits BU to imposing life-sacrifice on any members of the group just to improve the total score? The feature of SGSIT that stands in the way of such sacrifices may still be in force. Once we have SGSIT in mind, can we ignore it when we read (for example) Bentham saying that 'the balance ... on the side of pleasure' or 'pain' is to be taken to find 'the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number or community of individuals concerned'; or 'the general evil tendency, with respect to the same community'?18 If even one of the total number is disposed of to improve the score, it is

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 151 reasonable to say, we do not have the sort of score called for; we do not have a score for the same community. Moreover, we have monkeyed with the score in a way that frustrates the objective of improving the traits of all the people who are to be tested. Would it be a score for the same community in cases of voluntary lifesacrifice? It might be so conceived. We might conceive of the volunteer putting herself aside and comparing the group scores for the rest of the population, first with her apart, but not sacrificed, then given the sacrifice. The instructor in weaving does not count himself among the boys to be taught the trade. Why did volunteering make a moral difference to these authors? And why did they not apprehend that scoring on this basis opened the way to taking innocent lives? The operation, noticed or unnoticed, of SGSIT in the conception of scoring helps answer both questions: Involuntary sacrifices were no trouble, because SGSIT gave no scores supporting them; and the volunteer was investing herself with a responsibility setting her (like the instructor) apart from the rest, who could be scored under SGSIT. Late in Principles of Morals and Legislation Bentham touches briefly on capital punishment and allows grudgingly for occasional use of it. Capital punishment is, among other drawbacks, so 'unfrugal' - so apt to cause pointless pain - that it will be justified only in 'very extraordinary cases.'19 That the allowance is minimal is another argument for thinking that no notion of freely taking lives to improve group happiness scores was in Bentham's mind. Does the allowance accord with SGSIT? He hardly reveals enough of his reasoning to tell. But it fits what he says to have, following conviction, any prisoner in question set aside before taking the scores for the group (the community): first, the score given the deterrent effect of the other most efficacious punishment; then, the score given the deterrent effect of capital punishment.20 The comparison of these scores accords with SGSIT. Now the prisoner's scores are considered; and if the net increase in the score for the group (leaving him aside) does not more than offset any net loss of happiness on his part, capital punishment is ruled out. The effect in the end is the same as abandoning SGSIT to include the prisoner's scores in the scores for the group. The approach, however, is very different. To reason by way of an assumption about conviction, hence about punishment being due, then putting the prisoner aside so that SGSIT still operates when the scores for the group are compared, is to reason in a way not easily generalized to taking innocent lives.

152 Moral Objectives Does it accord with history to ascribe to Bentham some familiarity with SGSIT? Sidgwick and Edgeworth, even Mill, were writing after the Victorians had brought in periodic inspection of performances in schools, along with systematic measures of public health; so it is at least not anachronistic to ascribe to them familiarity with procedures for testing groups in respect to the traits of their members. With Bentham we face the difficulty that the felicific calculus may have been more of an innovation than it is nowadays taken for - not just a novel application, with some new features, of the idea of systematic testing of groups for improvement in individual traits, but an innovation that introduced the very idea.21 Yet Bentham did have before him some examples to the point: He was familiar with schools as well as prisons, and would have known that a schoolmaster's job was to teach every pupil in the class to read and write to the best of that pupil's ability. Parents and school governors would not have been pleased with a schoolmaster who ignored the more backward scholars, much less with one who, to produce a higher average performance at the end of the academic year, early in the first term assassinated them. The population to be scored is assumed to be given.22 Sidgwick may be reckoned as adding to BU when he takes up the question whether a future generation should be larger or smaller. Moreover, he not only adds this question to the field of application; he takes a further step toward detaching the pursuit of total happiness from the endeavor to make the members of the group happy when he maintains that future generations should be increased (despite any decline in average happiness) to the point where there is no longer an opportunity to make a marginal increase in total happiness by adding a further person. Even with this step, however, no occasion appears for imposing lifesacrifices upon some people now (or in any generation) just to raise the total score for the people remaining.23 II Forced choices. Can BU deal with medical cannibalization or the army captain's challenge? Let us define a forced choice as one in which no matter what we do, someone will suffer a severe reduction in the level of her happiness or even lose her life. The case of medical cannibalization, as so far described and treated, may be an unforced choice. There may be many alternative sources of the required bodily parts (perhaps the possibility of taking one part from one person, another part from another, doing mortal damage to no one). By contrast, the case of El Capitan Sanguinario seems a forced choice between shooting the twenti-

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 153 eth Indian and letting all twenty die; and Williams intends us to gather that we can only idly imagine a way out by some third option.24 The case, however, has two complications that might distract us from present purposes: The twentieth Indian (whoever she turns out to be) is going to die anyway; and you, the traveler just passing through, if you choose to shoot, will also choose which of the twenty will be shot. Instead of Sanguinario I let us concentrate on a revised case, Sanguinario II: Thinking better of his first proposal El Capitan says, Tell you what, amigo, I'll let all twenty go if you kill that young fellow among the bystanders, the one in the red hat; I don't like his looks.' Let every speculation about Sanguinario's reliability and about the possibility of an intervention fall aside as groundless. Sanguinario (or a sinister Rubenario Goldberg) has enticed you into a contraption that will put the youth in the red cap in your gunsight just a moment before the twenty Indian prisoners come into Sanguinario's field of fire. If you shoot the youth, Sanguinario's machine gun will be rendered inoperative; if you do not, he (or somebody) has set it to fire for sure. You are horrified; but even if you are too horrified to act, would you not understand how somebody in your position might reasonably, if agonizingly, decide that she should shoot the youth? (And in Sanguinario I, could you reasonably disregard the plea that each Indian would make to you to give them each a 19 in 20 chance of surviving?) If so, it is not reasoning from BU that persuades you. You are refusing any advice from BU not to kill because killing would be monkeying with the scores, and leaving behind the incapacity of BU to furnish group scores that tell us to kill. BU could be augmented to cover such cases, though then we should ask if we have before us historic utilitarianism.25 To cover forced choices, we could augment BU just to accommodate some scores that it does not as it stands accept. SGSIT does not apply. We can get group scores of a sort from algebraic sums of the prospective happiness scores (first taken as pluses, then as minuses) for the twenty Indians who will otherwise die taken together with the prospective happiness score (first as a minus, then as a plus) for the youth who will die if you shoot him. They would not be group scores of the sort contemplated by BU or compared as BU intends, but they would be scores from the same interpersonal felicific calculus in an extended application. With such scores, augmented BU might explain how the decision to shoot is justified. Unfortunately, if we turn back to medical cannibalization and redescribe the case with certain specifications, augmented BU leads

154 Moral Objectives uncomfortably to prescribing the sacrifice of the young man. Suppose that a very rare blood type makes the young man the only person on earth who can supply any of the organs that the surgeon's five other patients need. Now we have a forced choice: Cannibalization FC. Augmented BU will favor the five other patients if there is no reason to favor the young man in the comparison of life prospects among the six or in respect to future contributions to the happiness of others. We have not got back to Hedonic Act Utilitarianism, since augmented BU (we may suppose) still forestalls imposing life-sacrifices in unforced cases. Thomson, I expect, will still find the upshot outrageous; I do so myself. But would anybody find shooting the twentieth or the twenty-first person in either of the Sanguinario cases outrageous to this degree? Approve or disapprove, maybe going along with the decision in one case and not in the other,26 we could hardly reject as entirely unreasonable your decision to shoot in either case, if that is what you make your mind up to do. But what is it about Cannibalization FC that gives such a different impression from Sanguinario I and II and invites such a different result? Ill Rights, natural life spans, emergencies. Thomson says, 'One feels intuitively that the surgeon would be violating a right of the young man's, a fundamental right, in fact, and that is why the surgeon must not proceed. I am sure that this must be correct/27 (She doubts, however, whether it is illuminating, since 'we do not yet fully understand how the concept "has a right" itself works';28 and, as she observed earlier,29 to speak of a right may be no more than to say that it would be impermissible to do something, without explaining why.) Evidently the young man does have a current legal right not to be cut up without his permission. Precedents set in disposing of one's body and in agreeing to transplants imply that there is a standing social device (a bundle of rules) recognized in law that amount to his having such a right. But this is a contingent matter, as it is with the existence of any right, considered as a social device, including the right to security of life and limb, which also might be drawn on here. May it not be too risky to rely on the contingent existence of a relevant social device? The legislature and the courts might dismantle the right in favor of other social devices, and maybe leave no social device standing that gave the young man the protection in question. Moreover, the right to security of life and limb seems to bear upon the Sanguinario cases, too, and especially upon Sanguinario II. We may be uncertain about what to do, but at least we have to take seriously the possibility that the extra youth's

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 155 right is justifiably overridden in the Sanguinario cases. Why is it not justifiably overridden in Cannibalization FC? We might defend the young man in that case by going deeper than a right as a social device to consider the moral respect due him as a person - as a being whose life must be regarded as beyond manipulation (merely as a means to an end!). Thomson treats the original cannibalization case at three different places in the collection of her essays,30 and in one of them31 - the earliest in writing - she makes no mention of rights. Was this the wiser course? At bottom here is there perhaps not a right, but a moral consideration more fundamental than any right?32 However, if so, we have not yet come upon it, since the youth who will be sacrificed in Sanguinario II is just as much an end in himself as the young man who has come it may be - for him - so unpropitiously into the surgeon's office. It is relevant, but not decisive, that in Sanguinario (both Sanguinarios) something wrong was going to occur whatever is chosen, because the captain or Goldberg has done something wrong in setting the choice up. Hence, to apply a distinction of St Thomas's, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, facing a choice between evils, perplexus secundum quid.33 By contrast, in the cannibalization case, original or revised, we might want to say, nothing wrong is going to occur if the young man survives and the five others die; it is not wrong for people to die. This is relevant because it reflects the view of received morality; it also accords with Hume's confident assertion, once itself a received view, that though we can be mutilated what we lose in bodily parts cannot be of use to anybody else.34 It is not decisive because, first, natural emergencies might set up a forced choice between sacrificing one person and sacrificing others; and, second, because medical technology has made Hume's assertion obsolete. Yet on at least two points there seems to be a morally significant difference between Sanguinario II and Cannibalization FC. In Cannibalization FC (as in the original version) the natural life span of the young man would be cut short in order to extend the life spans of the others beyond what nature has allotted them. In Sanguinario II we may suppose that only natural assignments for everyone concerned are at issue; the captain's interference is threatening to bring those assignments to a premature end. In choices forced by natural emergencies, the assignments come into question only because of an act of Nature itself. But this reflection brings to light the second significant difference between Sanguinario II and Cannibalization FC. Sanguinario II (likewise Sangui-

156 Moral Objectives nario I) belongs to a family of cases in which emergencies, contrived by men or caused by nature, but improbable either way, have to be dealt with in forced choices. Cannibalization FC, by contrast, falls in with systematic planning to sacrifice lives whenever such sacrifices can be made useful in prolonging other lives. Might not the young man well ask, 'When did I sign up for any such plan?' He might, in agreeing to be a member of a given society, have reasonably agreed that in emergencies, natural or contrived, he would run a risk of being sacrificed in a forced choice. But he might reasonably expect that emergency-forced choices would be quite rare; he could reckon them to be rare even in an army in wartime, and with that expectation flock to the colours. Agreeing to join a society in which there is systematic planning for life sacrifices in medical connections would be a different matter. Here not only is there no experience to go on in assessing the risk; the risk is one that can be entirely precluded by social policy - a policy ruling out the planning in question. Utilitarianism, in the original BU version, supports just such a policy without mentioning a right. Augmented BU invites a constraint, which might be expressed in a right, on social planning. The notion of a right is undeniably attractive in this connection, even if it (like the notion of a social contract) is here as much as anything else a metaphor for expressing something that we want to say about consent: Social contract theory would license our speaking either of a natural right, emergencies apart, to at least one's natural life span, which the contracting agents bring to their deliberations; or of such a right created by the original contract. We would thus project the idea of a social device back upon an idealized hypothetical beginning, holding that it is a feature of any society organized on justifiable terms. But in this case it is a familiar projection already present in a natural right to security of life and limb, and it is a projection with a firm footing in existing social devices. Ending up with a right protecting the young man from cannibalization is, of course, to come out of the discussion at a familiar place. However, we did I think encounter some new things to observe on our way through the discussion: First, that BU can be understood as not entailing objectionable life sacrifices; second, that the subsequent trouble with utilitarianism on this point - the trouble in our time - comes from BU's having been augmented, usually by critics determined to see the worst in utilitarianism, in a way that betrays the intentions of the original advocates of the doctrine; third, that the right, insofar as it is compelling, comes up on one side of a distinction between forced choices that cannot

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 157 be eliminated by social policy and forced choices that social policy can entirely rule out. The right comes up with the latter sort of forced choices. Moreover, I would point out, the right was arrived at only as an option that standing on a principle of moral respect for persons might render redundant. Let me close by seizing the opportunity to reiterate the point that BU, unaugmented, forestalls having to resort either to the right or to the principle to save the young man. We can preclude having to face the forced choice that comes up in the cannibalization case by adhering (apart from inescapable forced choices of the other kind) to a combination of BU and good statistical method and with this method to the feature of SGSIT that has been crucial to my argument. Following good statistical method and heeding its results for comparisons of happiness or welfare offers an alternative to granting rights - an alternative that may sometimes afford more efficient protection. Consider the presupposition of BU that everyone is to be counted. Should this presupposition lead to a right to be counted? We may well hesitate to accept such a right, important as it is to make as sure as possible that everyone is counted. For, on the one hand to set up a right and thus give every person who might claim to be a member of the population a basis for insisting upon being counted may entail costs in litigation, administrative distraction, and hard feeling that actually obstruct the community from taking a timely and thorough census. But a census may not be so efficient as a sample survey anyway. Certainly, as the population becomes very large, and carefully controlled sample surveys become more accurate than complete censuses,35 we would do best to rely on samples. Now, someone omitted from a sample survey might, if the sample had not been suitably randomized, have grounds for complaining that the sampling had not given her or people like her a due chance of appearing in the sample. But would it make sense to give her to begin with a right to insist on being taken into the sample? Would this not be obstructive - not just distraction, but something that threatened to bias the sample? Her being counted is sufficiently assured, for purposes of comparing the happiness or welfare of the population under different policies, by general principles of statistical method, which, along with SGSIT, rule out eliminating anyone from the population before the sample is drawn and prescribe giving every member of the population an equal chance of figuring in the sample. I stress the generality of the principles:36 With very large populations, leaving this or that person out of the population will not significantly

158 Moral Objectives affect characteristics of the sample; nevertheless, if the principles are to be general enough to cover all populations, they will require leaving the population unchanged when sampling from it. (Certainly this will apply when drawing, in what turns out to be for BU as well as for statistical method the limiting case, a sample coextensive with the whole population, something feasible for small populations, something even requisite for accuracy.) Setting aside for other treatment forced choices of the sort that social policy is powerless to eliminate, the populations and samples that call for comparison under the combination of BU with good statistical method will automatically assure the young man in the surgeon's office of being considered with as much weight and accuracy as is feasible. The combination will also assure him of retaining his place in the population, hence his life. The question of cannibalizing his body for the benefit of other members of the population would never arise. Cannibalization is not a suggestion that BU, properly associated with good statistical method, would ever bring up. One might object that it is a weakness of BU that it has no stronger ground for rejecting the suggestion, should it come up, than its not being in accordance with the program of policy evaluation and choice that BU has adopted. Again, it is fair to say, BU has been saved by narrowing its application. However, where does the suggestion of cannibalization come from, and with what colour of reason? BU needs no defence against the charge that it makes the suggestion; the suggestion is not one of its embarrassments.37 Notes 1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986,257-60. 2 J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams [S & W], For and Against Utilitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 98-9. 3 S & W, 117. 4 In J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation ([1789], 1843 [Works, ed. Sir John Bowring, Edinburgh, London: W. Tait, Simpson Marshall, 1843]); J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1863); H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics ([1874], 7th ed. London: Macmillan, 1907); F.Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics (London: C.K. Paul, 1881). 5 Edgeworth, 75; cf. 65. 6 Nor is there any sign in what he writes of a suggestion that some members of the population might be tortured just to increase the happiness of others.

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 159 7 Edgeworth, 71-3.1 am making something more of the text than a strictly literal reading might. 8 Mill, chap. 2. 9 Sidgwick, Book IV. See also Book II, chaps. 2 to 7; Book III, chap. 14. 10 I owe to Robert Henderson this reference to Hutcheson. In a passage reprinted in Selby-Bigge, British Moralists, vol. 1,122 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897). Hutcheson says, 'If putting the Aged to death, with all its Consequences, really tends to the publick Good, and to the lesser Misery of the Aged, it is no doubt justifiable; nay, perhaps the Aged chuse it, in hopes of a future State. If a deform'd or weak Race, could never by Ingenuity or Art, make themselves useful to Mankind, but should grow an absolutely unsupportable Burden, so as to involve a whole State in Misery, it is just to put them to death.' These are (to say the least) arresting remarks, but they do not perfectly align with the examples that Thomson and Williams bring up - on the one hand, Hutcheson assumes that the Aged gain, too, by their death, not merely by entering a future State; on the other hand, the 'deformed, or weak Race' are not only irremediably useless, but 'involve' everyone else in 'Misery,' not something that can be said of the young man who has come in for his check-up, or said of any of the Indians. 11 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London: George Robinson, 1793), Book II, chap. 2. 12 Political Justice, Book VII, chap. 2. 13 Ibid. chap. 5. 14 J.B. Schneewind, in Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), briefly surveys Godwin's 'radical' utilitarianism, and says, 'Historically it helps us understand' how the utilitarian was repeatedly pictured as a 'monster of abstract rationality, basically selfish, denying the importance of family, friends, country, laws, traditions, replacing the Christian virtues of the humble heart by those of the calculating mind, reducing man to a machine for grinding out pleasures. Godwin, far more than Bentham, must be the original of these portrayals.' This may be so, but a charge that he endorses imposing involuntary life sacrifices just to promote the happiness of other people is hard to sustain. 15 Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics, 148. Schneewind describes the objection as 'commonplace/ but however commonplace it may be now, was it commonplace then? 16 The reliance varies in enthusiasm and precision. Ross Harrison has found Bentham himself, in the Constitutional Code (Bowring, vol. IX, 199), reasoning with only the loosest attachment, if any, to the calculus; there he holds that

160 Moral Objectives the only end of government is the greatest happiness 'of all without exception, in so far as possible: of the greatest number on every occasion on which the nature of the case renders it impossible, by rendering it a matter of necessity to make sacrifice of a portion of the happiness of a few, to the greater happiness of the rest.' He is not being a greatest total or greatest average utilitarian in the first clause of this statement, and in the second clause he is being a greatest number utilitarian. See Harrison, Bentham (London: Routledge, 1983), 233-4. 17 The notion of a precise average happiness score is not in much better shape. James Fishkin has pointed out to me that some current adepts of utilitarianism who have taken the greatest total happiness in the group as the supreme criterion find themselves confronting a problem about replaceability - substituting one person for another if the total score is thereby increased; see Fishkin, The Dialogue of Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 13-17, where he cites Peter Singer. They might think the constraints that come with the other notion, of making the people in a group as happy as possible - the SGSIT constraints - arbitrary, brought in ad hoc just to solve the problem. They seem to me to have got things phase backward. I would take them by the hand and lead them back to the point in the history of thinking about these matters at which making the people in a group as happy as possible began to be displaced by the other notion of greatest total happiness and try to persuade them that shifting to the other notion was ill-advised - creating a difficulty about intelligibility in the first place and then a host of difficulties about sacrifices to be imposed on members of the initial set of people whose happiness invited attention. Perhaps this was the worst move in the whole pernicious career of the concept of utility. 18 Bentham, Principles, chap. 4, (section) 5, (item) 6. 19 Ibid. chap. 15, (sections) 18 and 19; for the definition of 'unfrugal,' see section 11 of the same chapter. 20 Mill, advocating capital punishment rather than life imprisonment, in a speech in Parliament, concentrates on the prisoner and his prospects of suffering as an individual; Mill argues that life imprisonment implies a more painful prospect. J.S. Mill, 'Speech (1868),' in J. Feinberg and H. Gross, eds., Philosophy of Law (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1975), 619-22. 21 It need not gainsay Bentham's claim to innovation very much to recognize that he borrowed the root idea of calculation from Beccaria, or that he had some predecessors (Petty, and even more notably King) who were concerned with collecting statistics on the personal welfare of the population of England. 22 In the enormous mass of Bentham's papers there may well be explicit assertions that imply the^ame conclusion as my three arguments. P.J. Kelly, in

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 161 Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), based in part on unpublished papers, intimates as much without (I think) quite bringing the intimation home to the issue of the present paper. Paul Lyon has cited to me a passage in The Rationale of Rewards, one of Bentham's published works, reprinted in the Bowring edition, vol. II, 89-266, at 252, where Bentham opposes sacrifice. With or without the addition of explicit assertions, my three arguments retain the interest of showing what should sensibly have been made of the most familiar passages in Bentham (and Mill, and Esgeworth, and Sidgwick), though interpretation and criticism have taken another course. [Note, 1998: At this point, I would like to be able to produce some historical information about how Bentham's innovation in respect to the general use of statistics led to the degree of systematic use that became common after (say) the middle of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, my researches have not turned up such information. The historical aspects of statistics treated in the two encylopedias of the social sciences are almost exclusively aspects of the history of the theory of statistics rather than of the history of applications. I suspect, moreover, that it will be difficult to distinguish Bentham's influence from the influences of many others. I shall confine myself for the moment to observing that even if this proves so, it would not imply that Bentham had no influence; he may have had an important influence in creating a climate of opinion favorable to the use of statistics. His influence in this way may have been as important, and as progressive, as his influence in liberating us to treat pleasures of all sorts, playgoing, feasting, dancing, the merrymaking of Christmas, and the whole variety of sexual pleasures, on their merits, rather than under the multitudinous arbitrary prohibitions that various religions have launched against them. Moreover, whatever we make of the historical influence of the felicific calculus in regard to the use of statistics, to see the project of the calculus as a sketch illustrating just one possible way of making them systematically relevant may check us from the heavy-handed literalness with which the sketch - and it is no more - has usually been treated.] 23 Sidgwick's addition does give some purchase for Derek Parfit's problems, in his book, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, Part 4) about maximizing happiness in future generations; and because of the difficulty, which Parfit stresses, of disentangling the consequences for any present group from consequences for future generations (Parfit, 356-7), maybe BU would have vanishingly little scope if it does not take on these problems. 24 Could you get a gun and turn the tables on the captain? Williams says, 'It is quite clear that nothing of that kind is going to work.' S & W, 99. Hutcheson's cases (see n 5, above) are clearly forced choices.

162 Moral Objectives 25 A question not entirely decided by Bentham's seeming to make just this move in the greatest number quotation above; nor decided either by observing that one way of dealing with Bentham's allowance for capital punishment would be to say that at that point augmentation occurs in Principles itself. The 'very extraordinary cases' that Bentham had in mind might well be cases of forced choice, with severe reductions in happiness, even loss of life, in prospect whatever one does: He mentions as candidates for capital punishment 'competitors for the sovereignty and leaders of factions in civil wars,' whose names, so long as they live, suffice 'to keep a whole nation in flames.' Moreover, the interpretation adopted above, in the text of this paper, though it preserves a place for SGSIT, must concede that a step toward augmentation occurs with the final comparison, outside SGSIT, of the prisoner's scores with the group scores. Nevertheless, that interpretation is both more conservative and more helpful in explaining why taking innocent lives never came up in the thinking of Bentham and the others. 26 It may seem distinctly less horrifying (though horrifying even so) to shoot one of twenty, all of whom are otherwise going to die anyway, than to shoot a twenty-first person picked arbitrarily out of the crowd of bystanders. How much of the distinction will remain, however, if the twenty were picked out equally arbitrarily? A moment ago, they were free; they had just come to town that morning to sell some chickens. 27 Thomson, 260. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 47-8. 30 Ibid., chap. 6 and chap. 7 as well as the Afterword. 31 Chap. 6, an essay published in the Monist in 1976. 32 Some time after publishing (and republishing) the writings of hers that I have cited, Thomson published a valuable book devoted to rights - The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). In it she again takes up 'the Transfer Case,' and treats it with variations that I do not here bring into account, but instructive as her discussion of these variations is I do not think it affects my argument. Nor do her observations - often subtle and illuminating - on the general notion of rights. She has certainly advanced her understanding and ours of how the concept of a right works, but she has not resolved the issue of whether it must be a right rather than some other consideration that saves the young man from cannibalization. 33 St Thomas, De Veritate, Q. 17, art. 4; Summa Theologiae, Ia2ae, Q. 19, art. 6 and 3a, Q. 64. Both works cited following G.H. von Wright in Risto Hilpinen, ed., Introduction to Deontic Logic (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 2. St Thomas might insist only that morality would be quandary-free for anyone who had not

Liberalism, Statistics, and Utilitarianism 163

34 35 36 37

herself done something wrong; but it seems reasonable to generalize to quandaries created by the wrongdoing of someone else. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part II, section 2. W. Allen Wallis and Harry V. Roberts, Statistics: A New Approach (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1956), 113-14. Here I am responding to a comment by Sam Fitch. A number of people have helped with comments and advice: I particularly thank Judith Jarvis Thomson, Douglas Long, Natalie Davis and Chandler Davis, Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, Sam Fitch, Wayne Sumner, James Fishkin, and William Twining.

9

Justice and Injustice in Business

Note, 1998 The following chapter, designed to be read by university undergraduates taking a philosophy course for the first time, is easier reading, and in that way and others more fun to read, than most of the essays in this collection. It deserves some attention from sophisticated readers notwithstanding. With the essay (which is addressed to sophisticated readers) that follows it, it shares the idea that the most promising way to arrive at agreement about distributive justice is to begin with what people on every side will agree are flagrant departures from justice, and then move on to ask what conditions on distribution must hold if such departures are to be prevented. (I think of this as a 'departures' theory of justice.) The next essay, however, takes up the idea in the space of recent philosophical theories of distributive justice and presses questions about how any such theory is to give fully practical guidance in current circumstances. The present essay takes the idea up in the space accorded justice in the history of philosophy. Here the idea restores the connection between commutative justice and distributive justice: For the departures from justice with which both essays are concerned are departures from commutative justice, in which one person deals wrongly in exchanges with another. Hence the general argument of the present essay is that commutative justice cannot be had without distributive justice, too. The essay was loosely inspired by St Thomas's discussion of justice in the Summa Theologiae, and in particular by the Reply to Objection 3 in 2a2ae, Q. 58, article 11. The whole of his discussion of justice and injustice in 2a2ae and of law in Ia2ae is Reprinted from Just Business: New Introductory Essays in Business Ethics (New York: Random House, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by Random House. Reprinted with the permission of McGraw-Hill.

Justice and Injustice in Business 165 worth reading, remarkably topical still, and useful even when detached from his theological premisses. Even more loosely, the essay was inspired by the locus dassicus in Aristotle - Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics - in the sense that I have tried to cover the important points at issue in Aristotle's distinctions without binding myself to exactly those distinctions or to his terminology.

Business is a sphere in which questions of justice press for attention as urgently as anywhere, in all likelihood, and more variously. Important injustices can occur in sports (Who gets to play? Who is judged the winner?), the arts (Who gets attention? Who gets praised?), even in science (What lines of research are encouraged? Who is credited with the discovery?); but the injustices are not so various there. They are not even, I think, so various in politics or in family life, the only spheres that rival business in variety of applications for justice. Philosophers have as much to learn from reflecting on business as people in business have to learn from philosophers' reflections on justice. I shall begin, in Section 1, with a survey of the basic features of justice, for present purposes drawing my illustrations from business. There is some fun to be had from observing business; often, for many people, there is fun to be had taking part in it. We may be tempted, in the course of the proposed survey, to think of business as a game. It allows certain moves and disallows others, and the moves have consequences that, among other things, open up further moves for the players or close them off. Yet business, if it is a game, is a game that is played for keeps: Justice, when it is an issue in business, is likely to be a vital issue. Business is also a game that people must play whether they want to or not. You and I have to play it almost every day. Even if we get our income from other sources, business is where we spend it. How we fare in business, moreover, depends even more on what we bring to the game than it does in any other, less consequential games, for the resources of the players differ much more in business. I would not stand much of a chance playing basketball against Wilt Chamberlain; but at five foot ten inches I am more than five-sevenths of his height, I am at least half as fast in a short sprint, I can dribble a basketball, and I have on occasion sunk one through the basket. That makes us an even match, by comparison with the discrepancy between me and Exxon or even Henry Ford II. In assets relevant to business - take any asset you like Exxon has a million times what I do; you are probably in much the same situation. Is business a fair game? If it is not fair, will justice be done you and me and other players?

166 Moral Objectives Two further sections of the essay will follow section 1, which itself falls into three subsections. In section 2, I shall take up a number of kinds of injustice that frequently occur in business, but which (as I aim to show) can be remedied without doing more than restore the status quo ante from which they wrongly depart, or at least can be remedied without substantially changing the basic arrangements of the business system. Finally, in section 3,1 shall consider what might be done about charges that those arrangements - private property in the means of production; the power (founded on such property) of private firms; the market, perfect or imperfect - are unjust generally, and with them the positions that people are assigned in the status quo to begin with. I Basic Features of Justice In the last dozen years or so, philosophers have been remarkably active in discussing what is traditionally called 'distributive justice,' that is to say, justice in the way the benefits available to a society and the burdens of arriving at them are shared among its members. These discussions have brought a great deal of new light on the subject. However, concentration upon distributive justice has, I think, somewhat confused and distorted our notions about justice in general. Distributive justice itself cannot be fully understood if its place in a general picture of justice is not appreciated. Justice, in general, has to do with equality: on the one hand, with equality in departures from the status quo; on the other hand, with equality in the status quo. If we look upon business as a game, this is a difference between a condition on how moves are to turn out and a condition on (among other things) the power to make them. 1.1 Departures from the Status Quo

The status quo with which justice is concerned in a market society, where business as we know it is practised, is the distribution at any given instant of resources, including talents, skills, health, influence, and privileges, as well as the sorts of things (consumers' goods, producers' goods, and financial assets) that can be held as private property. I shall be primarily concerned with the distribution of these resources among persons, though I recognize that some of them are in the effective possession of firms rather than of persons, and others are held, both formally and effectively, by other private organizations, or by the state.

Justice and Injustice in Business 167 Some people may have in their possession resources that they did not acquire legitimately. For the time being I shall raise no questions on that score. I shall first consider how departures from a given status quo may be just or unjust, and if unjust, worsen matters. Then (1.2) I shall consider how departures (some of them otherwise just) may give some people unfair advantages in future status quos, which it would be just to prevent or remedy. Only then, by the natural route of discussing unequal advantages, will I come (1.3) to consider the justice of the received distribution of resources, as we might find it in the status quo that we began with. One way in which departures from the status quo may occur is exchange. You bring me ten beaver pelts; I give you, in return, a blanket, a rifle, and two jugs of whisky. Or you, a merchant in a genteel suburb, take some of my money; I carry away one of your lawnmowers. We have both departed from the status quo, but so long as we end up both better off, and indeed equally better off, the results are in accordance with justice. Sometimes such results - equal results - are perfectly unambiguous. If my tomatoes ripen before your apples do, my helping you pick apples for a day will give you exactly what you give me if you help me pick tomatoes for a day, that is to say, the same amount of help when it is needed. Not very different, so far as establishing equal results goes, is a case in which you and I alternate week by week in fetching the same amount of drinking water for each of us; over time, any advantage that one has on the first round from being able to wait and go second will vanish as proportion of the total benefit, however measured. Usually things are more complicated. What I give you is, as in the cases first mentioned, something very different from what you give me. We can always say, if the transaction is voluntary, that the parties agree in treating the value of what is exchanged as equal: You, the hardware dealer, and I, the suburban householder, agree to treat the lawn mower as having the same value as $159.99. Moreover, we are both better off: You wanted the money more than the lawnmower; I, the lawnmower more than the money. Yet in some ways we may not be equally better off, and thus the results may not be equal in every respect. You may have gained more than I by comparison with the ordinary prices of the things exchanged, or of comparable things. Other people regularly buy the same lawnmower for $79.99. As prices of high-rise buildings go, three squashed beer cans do not seem to be equivalent in value to the Empire State Building. You do not get equal results if I persuade you to make over the

168 Moral Objectives Empire State Building in return for them. If we could compare the utilities obtained by different people, we might expect to find that in many transactions one party gained much more utility than the other. Even without comparing utilities, we might find in some cases that one party doubled her already superior holdings of the good that she took in exchange, while the other got barely more than 1 per cent to add to his inferior holdings of the good that he received. These inequalities would raise questions about justice. Their existence does not settle the questions. Inequalities in additions to holdings (or to consumption) may be troubling when they are very substantial, as gross inequities in utilities would be. In a market society, however, great weight will be given to the consideration that both parties are satisfied with the deal, as they may perfectly well be, regardless of such inequalities. Justice seems to many to require no more. In their view, the results of an exchange are equal, so far as justice goes, by the agreement of the parties to treat them as equal. Deviation from the ordinary price is more troubling. One is compelled to ask whether both parties to the transaction had the same information or the same bargaining power in other respects. Even here, however, if the price was arrived at through bargaining, and both parties were reckoned to be adults competent to bargain (though not necessarily equal in skill), the deviation would be accepted. If the buyer did not know what the ordinary price was, perhaps he did not think the effort to find out worth making. If he knew, but decided to pay the extraordinary price anyway, because there was at least for the time being no one else to buy from, the price would reflect monopoly power on the part of the seller. However, monopoly power is often accepted without question (think of someone selling an heirloom, an antique chair). It would be accepted by many - though here an abnormal strain on ordinary moral convictions becomes visible - even if the party who pays more, perhaps much more, than the ordinary price has no real alternative to doing so, being in dire need of a good (say, potatoes) of which there is suddenly a dearth. Some exchanges take place under contracts. Breaches of contract are involved in some flagrant instances of injustice. A woman arranges to have her house painted for $1200 plus the paint; when, after five days' work, the painter comes for his money, the owner refuses to pay more than $950, giving as a pretext not liking the colour after all. Hobbes thought the connection between justice and contracts so important that he defined injustice as the not keeping of promises. However, the injus-

Justice and Injustice in Business 169 tice consists rather in the inequality of results than the breach itself (breaking the rule about keeping promises) - in other words, in the same failure of the departures from the status quo to match as occurs in any instance of unfair exchange. Here it was agreed, in the contract, that the departures would match if $1200 was exchanged for five days' work by the painter and his crew. The actual results are unequal, with the owner giving up less than a matching amount, and the painter giving up more. That it is the unequal results that are crucial, not the breaking of the promise, is proved by the fact that justice will call for setting aside the promise, if the results of keeping it - carrying through the exchange would be catastrophic to one party, in a way that no one could have anticipated, or in a way at least that the party in question was in no position to weigh sensibly earlier. This holds even when the party that stands to gain was quite innocent of any wrongdoing herself. She may not have done anything to mislead the other party; she may not have cheated on entering into the contract; she may not be about to cheat now. External events (for example, a sudden, gigantic rise in the price of gold) may with no help from her have brought about the change in prospects. It will still, if the catastrophe is big enough, be unjust to require keeping the promise (though some compensation for the prospective beneficiary may be called for). If (as may happen) a court upholds a contract when it turns out, unexpectedly, ruinous for one party (giving up the family farm, all his valuable possessions, half his income for the rest of his life), our respect for the courts will be severely strained. There may be some temptation, following the treatment of such cases offered by Hume, to consider that this only shows that justice may at times be at odds with human welfare. In fact it shows more: It shows that the letter of the law may be at odds with what justice requires. Usually, the person who stands to gain from an injustice in an exchange or a contract is not innocent. Perhaps - outside the ambit of legitimate business - he uses force to extort the exchange or the promise. Or, much more commonly in a market society, and common enough in business even though it is not legitimate, either, he cheats. He omits to reveal something about the goods that he offers that he should normally reveal, or he deliberately misrepresents the character of the goods to the other party. Cheating is the more specific charge; we readily make it in many connections where we would much less readily speak of 'injustice.' It seems that we reserve the term 'injustice' for cases in which one party is spe-

170 Moral Objectives cially vulnerable and the other exploits the vulnerability. Yet even in the case of the house-owner's failure to pay the full contracted price, where the painter, after the work is done, is in a specially vulnerable position, and it seems natural enough to speak of an injustice being done him, it may be even more natural to say that the painter has been cheated. Here the cheating may not have involved deception, for the owner may have decided not to pay the full price only at the last moment; nevertheless, the painter's legitimate expectations were defeated by an act of the owner, he was misled, and thus he was cheated. 'Cheating' rather than 'injustice' seems even more appropriate, indeed the uniquely favoured term, if we suppose that the painter is not just a local man, in business for himself, but a large national concern - a chemical combine, say, with a division that makes paints and through its retail branches contracts for house painting. In general, when there is a great inequality of power between the parties to an exchange or contract, the term 'unjust' is reserved for misdeeds of the more powerful party. You can cheat in your dealings with Union Carbide; you cannot be unjust to it. A treatment of the concept of justice that aimed to represent ordinary usage accurately would reflect this fact, as well as the displacement of the term 'injustice' by the term 'cheating,' or another term like 'theft/ in many cases where the parties are equal, and in some where they are not. However, for present purposes, it seems accurate enough, and it certainly is simpler, to treat all cases in which exchanges, whether under a contract or not, have unequal results as cases of injustice, including cases in which the party profiting from the inequality has cheated to obtain such results, sometimes in the face of a party much more powerful. Unequal results are the basic consideration again in the injustices arising from injuries that come as it were out of the blue, imposed by departures that are not preceded or launched by striking a bargain. There is a nicety that I shall disregard here and elsewhere: The injustice may be said to lie rather in letting the unequal results stand than in reaching them in the first place. I borrow your truck to haul a load of manure from the race track. I attend a drinking bout with some cheerful loose women and end up smashed. So does the truck, which I turn over on top of a wayside pizza parlour. Or you begin manufacturing margarine from pig fat in your backyard. Living next door, I am forced to keep all my windows closed. Even that does not do much to keep away the oily stink; moreover, there is a lot of horrible greasy smoke coming my way in ever greater, ever more-depressing quantities. In each of these cases, one person has done some harm to the other,

Justice and Injustice in Business 171 gaining something for himself (at least some moments of whoopee), but leading the other to depart for the worse from the status quo. We can think of either case as amounting after all to an exchange, an exchange with unequal results, and therefore objectionable; or to an exchange that has to be completed if injustice is to be avoided. I must restore your goods intact; or, if I cannot do that, I must pay you compensation - the value of the truck. You must compensate me for making my house uninhabitable; or, as well, perhaps instead, you must be subjected to punishment for violating a city ordinance. Restoration and sometimes compensation are means of balancing the departures from the status quo so that no one loses by the departures. One or more people may even gain: The value of the margarine may exceed the compensation that has to be paid for the damage to my standard of housing. Punishment, if it is adequate, makes the departures match by making them both negative: I lose in worsened housing; you lose just enough in fines or imprisonment to make it not worth your while to have done the worsening. Sometimes compensation has a negative result on one side, and thus again leads to a social loss overall: I perhaps sadly conclude, when the time comes to pay up, that the whoopee was not worth the price of the truck (to say nothing of the spoiled pizzas and the disconcerted pizza patrons). When we shift our attention from cases of a single person being dealt with by another person (or a firm) to a larger social perspective, matching departures and equal results again figure decisively. A person does something to benefit society - perhaps by doing a good job arranging for businessmen to cooperate in a downtown improvement scheme. It will be unjust to withhold from her the reward, which she has grounds to expect, normally given for such contributions (which may be just praise), and especially unjust if other people who did no more are rewarded simultaneously. If the contribution was negative - an injury to society rather than a benefit, justice calls for matching the departure by restoration or compensation or punishment. When a judge requires a juvenile delinquent to repair the shop windows that he vandalized, and perhaps some more besides, restoration and punishment run together, creating an especially satisfactory instance of justice accomplished. The status quo is regained; and the negative departure, balanced, negatively, by the unwilling effort. In a social perspective, justice and injustice often visibly generalize over whole social groups. Blacks or Indians or women put in the same effort, conferring equal benefits on society, but do not get as much recog-

172 Moral Objectives nition, or as much pay, as white men doing the same work, whether it is plucking turkeys, assembling generators, or processing life insurance applications. Blue-collar workers find the courts much readier to jail them for making off with some extra engine parts than to jail executives for genteelly conspiring to fix the prices of toaster ovens. These aberrations are, moreover, not just a matter of objectionable departures at any one time. The groups that suffer disproportionately many such departures suffer disproportionately time after time. One may infer that social arrangements which persist from one status quo to the next continually engender the injustices in question. 1.2 Unequal Advantages in the Next Status Quo The results of departures in one period establish a changed status quo from which departures will be made in the next. The game begins again on different terms. If the results were unjust, enriching some people at the expense of others, and there are no compensating changes, they bring about a distribution of resources (in private property and in other resources like influence) that raise the prospects of injustice in further departures. For rich men can more easily wriggle out of contracts than poor men - they can hire more expensive lawyers. They can also deploy, in the negotiations that lead to transactions and contracts in the first place, more refined skills and more comprehensive information; so they can get away with more at that stage, too. The new status quo will itself be more unjust because it lends itself more readily to creating injustices. Moreover, results unjust in one period will, by increasing the advantages in bargaining that some people have over others, increase the chances of troubling results in the next - results accepted by convention as equal by agreement of the parties on the value of the goods exchanged, but unequal, maybe very unequal, by comparison with ordinary prices or in terms of proportionate gains. Troubling results in one period will themselves have the same effect in the next. As the advantages of some people accumulate from status quo to status quo, it will become more and more difficult to suppress questions about whether bargaining, with such unequal advantages, uncorrected in procedures, can be fair to all parties. Fairness is a matter of procedures, while justice is a matter of results; but, of course, the two are closely connected (so much so that the terms are sometimes interchangeable). Increasing trouble about the fairness of procedures is bound to lead to increasing misgiving about the justice of results.

Justice and Injustice in Business 173 Disconcertingly, even under fair procedures, advantages that are questionable on the point of fairness can creep in; unless they are corrected for, the procedures will no longer be fair. To put the point another way, we may say that just results from the past may, when looked upon as resources available for further departures, give some persons unacceptably unequal advantages. Consider a professional basketball player who can attract thousands of fans each willing to pay five dollars to see him play. If only a fraction of the five dollars finds its way into his pocket, he is likely to become rich - much richer than most of his fans. The transaction between him and each of his fans may not quite fit the model of a fair exchange, even if we disregard the intervention of third parties like the club owner: What the basketball player gives up to any one fan is nothing substantial or even distinguishable. Nevertheless, each fan may be perfectly satisfied that it was worth as much as five dollars to have a part in seeing the player's performance. There is honest dealing all around; and no question that the player is doing anybody an injustice in collecting his share of the ticket prices paid so cheerfully by his fans. What then could be wrong from the point of view of justice? A number of quite serious things. First, one should notice that having become extraordinarily rich, the basketball player is in a position to restrict other people's freedom and exercise power over them, in any of a number of ways, from hiring henchmen to beat them up to influencing politicians to disregard their claims. None of the fans, in paying five dollars for admission, consented to this power; it is an unintended overall consequence of a lot of single actions in which nothing of the sort was intended. It is also a consequence that no one fan could prevent by refusing on his own to buy a ticket. Second, being extraordinarily rich, the basketball player now has greater bargaining power than many of the people with whom he may choose, one by one, to exchange goods. They will need to trade with him more than he needs to with them. Third, the basketball player, if he keeps his riches, will have a great advantage henceforth over other people in meeting needs and following preferences. He may already be in a position to buy up for himself all the remaining seashore, or the last pears of the season. If hard times come, he will be able to go on meeting his needs, when some or all of his fans have lost the capacity: Their reserves will not enable them to hold out through a time of famine; they will not be able to bid as much as he can for what supplies remain. These points could be interpreted to imply that the exchanges

174 Moral Objectives between the player and the fans were not so fair as they looked: The fans were giving up, not just five dollars each for admission and whatever else they might have bought for the five dollars, but increments of power and advantage, and not getting anything in return for these unintended and unnoticed consequences. There is a conflict in our ways of thinking about these matters. What we consider justice in acquiring and holding private property does not consort happily with what we consider justice in the subsequent status quo, considered as a distribution of direct power over other people and of advantages in bargaining. In this respect, results that are not troubling pair by pair become troubling when they are aggregated for one person from his belonging to many pairs. Results that are troubling to begin with add troubles on this point to the more obvious troubles about discrepancies in the immediate gains for the two parties. Here, too, the ways in which the results are unequal may be overridden in many people's view by the fact that the parties have agreed to treat the value of what is exchanged as equal. The pre-eminence given to this consideration leads people to ignore, or to give little weight to, the increased power and increased advantages in bargaining that, with private property, parties may take away from transactions. Moreover, the pre-eminence leads people to neglect questions about the unequal advantages that the parties will bring to further transactions. Would it be any different if the advantages come, not from exchanges cumulatively specially favourable to any person with the advantages, but from work done on his own? I have been treating justice as a matter of departures in which more than one person is immediately involved. It is possible, however, for a person to depart from the status quo and gain advantages in the next one by accumulating resources out of the product of his own labour. Imagine a farmer, who perhaps works harder than most, grows more, and has in the end a surplus beyond what his household requires, to which he adds in effect another surplus every year, so that he can operate on an even larger scale. It is hard to see that he is doing anything unjust in creating and keeping these surpluses; indeed, he seems to deserve praise for being unusually provident. Can there be anything objectionable in the advantages that he gains thereby? That there is may be more disconcerting, and harder to accept than before; but essentially the case is the same. The farmer, like the basketball player, has done, item by item, nothing illegitimate; but both, through saving some of their gains, have acquired power that in the three ways enumerated poses a threat to other people. Someone could

Justice and Injustice in Business 175 do this, in fact, without having a rare talent or working harder than most people, simply by saving more. In all these cases, if the resources saved were acquired without any current objection, there would be an affront to justice in expropriating them afterwards. Nor would this affront be merely an effect of the present attachment, so far as it goes, of our thinking about justice in part to the institution of private property. Any change in social rules that upsets expectations legitimately formed under the rules as previously understood and defeats actions which people have taken with those expectations is an affront. It is a negative departure from the status quo, which could not be compensated for so long as the change is to remove advantages in resources. The affront to justice would not occur if the rules were changed long enough in advance (ex ante, as economists say) so that people could adjust their affairs and escape losses disproportionate to those of other people. If all changes in the rules for acquiring, keeping, and using property, for example, were announced a generation in advance, the injustices springing from upset expectations would for the most part disappear. Moreover, it would be intolerable for society at large not to be able to change the rules at least with notice of a generation. In practice, it is accepted that the rules (for example, about the rates and incidence of taxes) can be changed with much less notice. In an emergency, where some people's very existence is threatened, a government will be expected to move at once: It will not, for example, accept in a famine the prices that the merchants who hold the only stocks of potatoes might wish to charge, even though hitherto, under the rules, the merchants were free to accumulate such stocks and charge varying prices for them. The injustice done to the provident might be done a small-business man - someone who had spent years building up a foundry or making a success of a restaurant. However, it is appropriately thought of as injustice done to a farmer. Our notions about justice still reflect the arrangements of the agrarian society in which most of our ancestors lived, even in what are now heavily industrialized countries, until some time in the nineteenth century. Under those arrangements, or rather under an idealized form of them, typical citizens were individual farmers assigned land on which it was their responsibility (with the help of their households) to raise pretty much everything that they needed. If farmers worked hard, they could prosper; if they chose to be idle, what claim could they have upon the products of those farmers who had not chosen to be idle, who might in fact, in spite of hard work, have little to spare?

176 Moral Objectives Yet accumulated resources create difficulties even in these circumstances of minimal interdependence. Not only do the resources still constitute advantages - which may lead to some farmers losing their independence. What is to be done about farmers who work hard, but are unlucky about floods and lightning? Can they justly be simply left to starve? Will it be unjust for them, if they get no help, to seize what they need from others? What is to be done about the children of the farmers who have in idleness or folly wasted their resources? In a society in which a great deal of interdependence exists - for example, a fully developed market society - the conflict between giving the present scope to private property and accepting the status quo is bound to be more acute. Such is the society in which yonder basketball player is becoming rich: He could not devote himself to playing basketball unless a lot of other people grew tomatoes, stitched shirts, shingled roofs, drove buses, felled trees. Are their contributions to society not so worthwhile as the basketball player's? Why should their contributions be less worthwhile because their skills are not so rare? Their skills may be as complex and as hard won. Should they not keep more or less abreast of him in the resources that they command? Surely there is a very powerful impulse in us to say, 'Yes'; and that impulse springs from our sense of justice. It comes the more strongly when the discrepancies in resources persist and accumulate, favouring some people to such an extent that the rest can never hope to catch up. A market society, however, will persist in finding it congenial to value contributions at the prices that can be got for them in the market and to reward people accordingly. The conceptual situation is further complicated by the fact that private property also counts, in a market society, as a source of contributions to production. Our notion that it is just to reward people for their contributions, which has its roots in our appreciation of their personal efforts, is generalized in our ordinary thinking to cover contributions that people make by putting their property to use raising crops on it, building mills on it, and investing in processing equipment, or simply in buying shares in going firms (which supposedly sooner or later releases funds for new investment). Thinking like this aggravates the conflict with the idea that no one should be able to increase - indefinitely - his or her advantages over other people. 1.3 Unequal Advantages at the Start, in the Prior Status Quo

The opposition that our sense of justice presents to the accumulation of unequal advantages in departures from the status quo - unequal advan-

Justice and Injustice in Business 177 tages in political power and in bargaining power, increasing the frequency of unjust results and troubling results - readily converts into opposition to any unequal advantages that already exist in the status quo. So we come at last to raise questions about the justice of the status quo that we imagined starting with - the present status quo, let us say, present at whatever instant we take up the discussion of justice. Insofar as those unequal advantages in the present status quo are taken to be unfair advantages, they make the procedures by which departures will be made from the status quo unfair, too, implying that the status quo is systematically biased against reaching just results in those departures. On that ground, the status quo may be said to be unjust. Or the status quo may be called unjust simply in anticipation of the unjust results that will be forthcoming from it, and in anticipation of troubling results, too, to the extent that these are lumped together with the unjust ones. And will they not be lumped together, whenever it turns out that they, too, are consequences of unequal resources? We are not to suppose, however, that all that justice or injustice signifies for the present status quo can be captured by considering how the distribution of resources positions people to maintain or increase their resources (and their advantages) in the next one. To do so would be to omit to consider why in the end these advantages - and justice itself, implying approval or disapproval for them - are prized. Justice requires us to consider, as well, how people are currently faring in the status quo. Are their needs being met, right now? If their needs are not, are their preferences being heeded? The question whether everyone is in a position to meet his needs is a relatively easy question to answer, if we take a strict view of needs, that is to say, count as a need only something that must be met if a person is to function normally, and count as meeting it the minimal provision that will enable a given person to function. Food, clothing, shelter, companionship are such needs; sex is for many people; we may add education and recreation. Inevitably what are defined as minimum provisions for any of these needs will have conventional features that vary between cultures. In any given culture, however - in our own - general agreement can be attained on perfectly definite minimum provisions, at least if the minima are set low enough. For example, people need enough clothing to move about out-of-doors without shivering. This agreement can be extended, moreover, to cover variations of minima among persons. If some people cannot maintain the same weight or same level of energy without more food, they need more food. Supposing that there are resources to spare after meeting everyone's

178 Moral Objectives needs, the question next arises, are the spare resources distributed so that people have substantial chances, if not equal chances, to have their preferences heeded? Some preferences will almost surely have been heeded in choosing provisions to meet. There would be no point in providing everybody with cheese-and-macaroni dinners when almost everybody likes minced collops better. People commonly have more refined preferences than that, however, even in respect to their basic diet; and these go far beyond what is required to meet their needs. Many would never eat minced collops at all if they could have things like fillet of sole with shrimp stuffing, and on the side a nice bottle of chilled Gewuerztraminer. Some would cater less to their palates, but care about preferences in other matters, delighting in jewelry, mink stoles, fine editions, and porcelain whatnots. It is difficult to answer in any precise way the question about equal chances to have preferences heeded. Will heeding a few important preferences compensate a given person for disregarding a number of less important ones, and if so, which and how many? The economists' notion of 'utility' does not lay these questions to rest; even at its most sophisticated, it eludes practical measurement as an empirical datum for social policy. How are importance and number of preferences to be balanced when we try to heed the preferences of several people at the same time? Deep logical problems stand in the way of finding a satisfactory system of combining preferences through voting; and formidable practical problems would beset any attempt to enable masses of people to express through voting a detailed variety of preferences. The market may do better than voting as a practical device for this purpose; yet it does not, in practice, live up to the theoretical claims for it, and those claims cannot be fully justified, even in theory, once it is acknowledged that public goods (lighthouses, law and order, pure science) must be considered as well as private ones. Nevertheless, it is often possible to discern gross discrepancies in provisions for preferences. A real estate operator in Vancouver recently bulldozed a French Regency mansion (including eight bathrooms and a swimming pool), worth $1 million after renovation, to make way for a $4 million palace, built as a present for his new wife. 'Whether or not I knock down a house/ he told reporters, 'is about as important as what colour pants I put on.' Meanwhile, one may safely assume, a number of women in that same city, deserted wives, mothers with children to support, were labouring all day, day after day, for minimum wages washing pots or plucking turkeys.

Justice and Injustice in Business 179 The questions that I have formulated as questions about current farings in the present status quo can easily be turned into questions about a succession of status quos and their common properties. Are everybody's needs met time after time? Does everybody have a substantial chance of getting preferences heeded? Or are there respects in which some people at least are continually treated less than equally? If there are, we may well, in judgments about the justice of these respects, revert to the view of possessions in which they are looked upon as advantages in replacing and increasing personal resources during the succession of status quos. However, we can persist in the perspective that highlights current faring. In that perspective, even if temporary discrepancies were accepted without distress, perhaps as matters of luck, the continual repetition of the discrepancies, with one set of people always faring well, and another always faring badly, would seem unjust. Some people, and their children, would be living their lives out - very possibly, shortened lives - without having any chance to live decently; others would be surfeited with pleasures. Such discrepancies would seem unjust to many even if no one had deliberately produced them, so long as they were capable of being remedied. Can it be just for a mining financier to have seventy pairs of Gucci loafers (the same style loafers) and to stand thirty friends at Las Vegas five rounds of triple bullshots at eighteen dollars a drink, while turkey pluckers and their children scrape by in poverty? The resources wasted in those loafers and triple bullshots could be drawn upon to meet their needs and lighten their lives. Moreover, it is not simply a matter of resources being available that could reduce the discrepancies. If we have in view members of the same society, some in luxury, some in dire need, the people involved in the discrepancies have places in the same network of mutual responsibilities. Everybody in the network is expected to do her part in maintaining society; in particular, everybody is expected to forbear from attacking other people and making off with their goods even when she can get away with doing so. The people who are faring ill may well be doing more than forbear. They may be working as hard, or harder, and as skilfully, or more skilfully, than most of the people who are enjoying luxury. These considerations cumulate in a powerful argument for regarding discrepancies in current faring, and with them the society and status quo in which they occur and persist, as unjust. It must be granted that this argument, as well as the earlier argument from the dangers of unequal power, conflicts with views widespread in a market society. Not only do those views by and large accept the market as conferring

180 Moral Objectives justice upon its results; they waive any searching questions about the distribution of resources with which people, owning greater or lesser amounts of property, enter the market. One cannot justify waiving those questions merely by citing the possibility that the inequality of resources in the present status quo may not have come about through unjust actions on the part of the people who have more resources. Nevertheless, it is true that any attempt to equalize current faring by redistributing resources would, like attempting to equalize power (or check growing inequalities) by the same means, do a number of people injustice by upsetting hitherto legitimate expectations, under which they were led to make departures that now turn out to be for the worse. If one is to choose sides in this conflict, I would think one does better to choose the side of the first of the two arguments. The upset to expectations, which is the most serious point about justice on the other side, since it is a point that follows from perfectly general considerations of principle, can be mitigated by giving as much advance notice of reforms as possible. On other points, the other side argues from a theory of the market that ignores imperfections in the real world or simply affirms an uncritical acceptance of current practices. To some extent, however, the conflict even on these points is far from being completely irreducible. The injustices of particular departures from the present status quo can be remedied by measures that do not substantially jeopardize the operation of the market in the real world. Indeed, as I am about to show in section 2 of this essay, such measures already exist, though they are in some connections painfully incomplete. Moreover, they could be made completer without jeopardizing the market; on the contrary, making them completer would bring the market in the real world closer to the ideal market of theory, or otherwise fulfil the views cherished on the other side. Even the further-reaching reform, designed both to make current faring more equal and to check the dangers of power, that I shall discuss in section 3, can be carried through without abandoning private property and the business system. The nature of the reforms - an inheritance tax, a progressive income tax - is already familiar. The reforms have even been formally enacted without in practice unsettling the business system in any fundamental way. It is true that the enactment has been so limited and qualified that the reforms have been far from achieving their purpose. I shall argue, however - renewing the argument for these reforms - that even effective legislation would, if it were brought in step by step, leave the business system standing.

Justice and Injustice in Business 181 2 Checking Particular Sorts of Unjust Departures Many people, including people active in business but disillusioned about it, incline to think that injustice and unethical conduct generally are inherent in business. I have known professors to declare, There is no such thing as ethics in business.' But this is not so. One might as well say that injustice was inherent in social life. That is where it is found, because that is where the opportunities for it arise. Similarly, lots of different opportunities for injustice arise in business, but except in specially difficult cases where whatever one does will be unjust, these opportunities for injustice are also so many opportunities for justice, and may be so approached, even by parties that have the advantage in bargaining power. At the very least, whatever unfair advantages business may accept in the status quo, there are a lot of injustices that can be avoided in departures from it. In the three subsections of this section, I shall consider, first, the injustices that persons may do to firms and the injustices that firms may do in transactions with consumers; next the injustices that firms may do in transactions with firms; finally, the injustices that firms may do in the employment relationship. 2.1 Persons Unjust to Firms; Firms Unjust to Consumers

So many of my previous examples have involved persons dealing with persons that at this point I need no more than mention that many opportunities for justice and injustice occur in such dealings, even nowadays. Nowadays, however, most persons do most of their business with large firms, so very likely it is toward firms that they act unjustly in business, when they do. In this connection, too, there is no need for me to mount an extended discussion. The facts are familiar, and seeing their import for justice requires at most a few verbal adjustments. We may acknowledge, as we did earlier (1.1), that more specific words like 'cheating' or 'stealing' pre-empt the part that on general grounds 'injustice' is entitled to play here. We can refuse to let pop terms like 'rip-off delude us into looking on cheating and stealing with an amused, indulgent view when firms are the victims. Some people, 'ripping off the Bell telephone system by evading long distance telephone charges, contrive to think of themselves simultaneously as playing a high-spirited prank and as striking a blow to redress social grievances against rich, powerful, and allegedly insensitive corporate giants. In fact, they are cheating; they are doing, in general terms, an injustice by bringing about a departure that gives unequal results favouring their own interest.

182 Moral Objectives There is no need, either, for me to treat at length the ways in which firms can be unjust to consumers. The ways in question are susceptible of infinite variation, but most of them fall into one or another familiar category: deceptive sales tactics, extortionate prices, defective goods, refusal of redress. These matters have not gone unnoticed. The status quo in market societies has always provided consumers with some power to redress injustices when they have occurred. When the damages are very great, the present status quo provides for bringing suit against offending firms in regular courts. When the damages to any one victim are otherwise too small for litigation, it provides for legal remedies in part by setting up small claims courts and in part by entertaining class actions that bring together the small claims of a number of consumers. The present status quo also has provisions for increasing beforehand the capacity of consumers to avoid being taken in by careless or unscrupulous firms. Consumers are empowered to denounce sales contracts within a few days of signing them. They are supplied with information assisting them in the precautions that they need to take. Some of the information is supplied by reputable firms through Better Business Bureaus, some through industry-sponsored testing laboratories. Some of it is supplied by consumers' magazines. A great deal of it is supplied by the government, which tests and grades all sorts of products, and continually monitors the output of industry, especially for safety. Can it be maintained that these provisions have interfered with the market so much as in effect to do away with it? In the past - indeed, to this day - courts have hesitated to interfere with exchanges and contracts knowingly entered into on both sides by competent parties, but they have always been prepared to restrain fraud and misrepresentation. The theory of the (ideal) market itself assumes that participants are fully competent and knowledgeable. The enlarged provisions now existing in the status quo for information (on packages and elsewhere), and for reflection (after signing contracts) increase the chances of realizing the sort of market envisaged by the theory. The justification of regulating certain prices (electricity, telephones, railroad service) is different, but still consistent with the theory of the market. The theory concedes that certain goods are most efficiently supplied by monopoly producers; there the competitive market necessarily fails, and fair exchanges cannot be ensured without regulation. Inevitably, regulation of this sort is concerned not simply with the justice of the departures, but with the justice of the status quo itself - with the justice of the powers assigned at the points of departure. The same, however,

Justice and Injustice in Business 183 can be said of the other provisions just surveyed, and of provisions for dissolving some monopolies - in favour of a more vigorous market - by anti-trust actions. They are provisions for redressing or avoiding certain departures, but to accomplish these things they modify the resources, including bargaining powers, otherwise assigned in the status quo. The modifications need not be thought of as superimposed on the present system without compensating changes. If, for example, what alarms people about the modifications is that they would increase the burden and complications of a body of regulations already complicated and burdensome, it would be possible in principle to calm them by removing some existing regulations at the same time. Notoriously, not all existing regulations have worked out well in achieving the purposes for which they were adopted; some of them have actually been counterproductive. But if some old regulations on private property and the free operation of the market were removed as the new regulations aiming at greater justice are introduced, the net effect in increased restrictions on business may be negligible. 2.2 Firms Unjust to Other Firms Firms can treat other firms, as well as people, justly or unjustly. The particular departures, or sorts of departures, from the status quo can be identified and - when they involve injustices - in many cases remedied without raising questions about fundamental changes in the status quo. Again, the status quo already embodies some provisions for remedy. When the provisions are absent, or present but in one way or another burdensome, suggestions will arise about taking away powers to impose such departures, and about creating powers to avoid them or to have them redressed. We arrive, again, at questions about modifying the status quo. These are still, however, questions that arise about checking particular sorts of departures rather than about reforming the status quo in a general way. Some firms act as sales agents of others. They are the 'authorized dealers' for certain brands of stereo equipment; they have the local franchise to pump a particular brand of gasoline or the franchise to sell Hupmobiles. The firms that sell through them - the manufactures of stereo equipment, gasoline, and Hupmobiles - look in their turn to yet other firms for supplies. However, the firm in the middle may have both the agent firms and the supplier firms under their thumbs.

184 Moral Objectives The agent firms have clienteles that look to them for brand-name products. The firms in the middle can threaten not to supply the products; not to renew the franchises; not to renew the loans of capital that went with the franchises. Accordingly, they can force the agent firms to accept unfavourable terms - for products, or for franchises, or for loans. The terms may get more unfavourable with each renewal, since the dependency of the agent firms is likely to increase over time. Oil firms have sometimes treated the (nominal) owners of service stations in such ways, and automobile manufactures have similarly treated their dealers. The agent firms have little recourse. Supplier firms, confronted with demands for lower prices, have even less. The supplier firms have often specialized in making things, like auto parts, designed for use by just the firms that they supply; or those firms form most of the market, perhaps all the market, for the things that the supplier firms produce. However, the courts will not compel the firms in the middle - the Hupmobile firm, for example - to renew contracts, much less to go on buying from the supplier firms in the absence of a contract. Yet in all these cases, the departures from the status quo are negative for the agent firms and the supplier firms, and nonmatchingly to the advantage of the firms in the middle. Dependency, and injustice, may run the other way. The supplier firms, big or little, may have monopolies, perhaps through patents that they hold, perhaps because no would-be rivals can easily assemble the expensive plant required to enter their industry. Firms in the agent position sometimes represent such large proportions of the market for the goods produced by the firms in the middle that they can exact uncomfortably large discounts or rebates from them. Big grocery chains, for example, often drive hard bargains with the bakeries and canneries that supply them. If the discounts are passed on in lower prices to consumers, however, will there not be something to be said for what the firms in the middle do in all these cases? The firms in the middle may have gained something - part of what they saved in the bargains that they reached stuck to their fingers - but the public may have gained even more. If the supplier firms make no profit, however, or less than they normally would, the public has gained (along with the winning firms) at their expense. Efficiency and justice have not been reconciled. In real-world business, efficiency may pull one way and justice the other, even when the firms taking the lead in efficiency do not squeeze their agents or their suppliers. They may do nothing flagrantly unfair in

Justice and Injustice in Business 185 competing with their rivals either. A nationwide grocery chain may get lower prices from its suppliers; the suppliers may be glad to offer such prices to be able to do business on a large scale. Furthermore, the chain may do nothing deliberately intended to drive smaller groceries out of business, like temporarily lowering prices below costs in a given vicinity while it continues to take in profits elsewhere. (That is a classic example of unfair competition.) The economies of scale passed on to consumers may be just as fatal to the small stores, however, and almost as quick acting. Mom and Pop just can't sell bread or canned ham or soap as cheaply; they can't compete; even long-established groceries that used to be the biggest in town can't. People with a business frame of mind outside the losing firms may be inclined to write off the fate of these firms as caused by their own inefficiency. They are, it would seem, either justly punished for their slackness, or justly denied their former rewards because they no longer make so useful a contribution to society. Yet, in fact, those firms may have been as efficient as ever, given the old terms of trade; and the people in them - decent people, who deserve a decent life - may have worked more diligently than most. What has happened is that the terms of trade have been changed; the grocery chain has innovated in operating on a larger scale. The ruined firms have done nothing to be punished for. Should they be compensated? Taking a more sophisticated view, people with a business frame of mind, and other people too, might still say, 'No.' Would economic progress be possible at all if every innovation capable of increasing efficiency had to bear the burden of compensating every firm that would lose business because of the innovation? One can easily imagine that a comprehensive system of providing compensation, with hearings and appeals, would give full-time employment to a host of lawyers and bureaucrats, but slow innovation down to a crawl. In practice, innovation has more often than not been pretty much allowed its head, in the belief that sooner or later everybody will benefit from it. Yet this belief has only vague and shaky foundations. Often enough, some firms have to close up shop and the losses imposed on them are not made up in any distinct and visible way, if at all. Have not the firms and the people involved in all probability suffered from an unremedied injustice? Forms of compensation could be envisaged for them and forms of protection, too. If we rule such measures out as inefficient, that is because we care more for efficiency than for justice in some of its aspects even more than we do for private property, specifically property in the

186 Moral Objectives losing firm, whose assets as well as expectations may be much diminished. Innovations could be phased in, so that the old-time small grocery firms might have several years to shift to other lines of business. Or they might be kept going with subsidies until, a few years later, the people chiefly involved in them were ready to retire anyway. Firms not in a position to wind up their affairs at any early date might be given special privileges. In Quebec, for example, where alcoholic beverages were long sold only through publicly owned outlets, Mom and Pop stores sell beer. Some forms of protection already exist, most notably in anti-trust legislation. The main rationale for such legislation, of course, is that large firms with something approaching monopoly power are likely to charge prices higher than competitive ones. Part of the support for the legislation, however, seems to come from a widespread feeling that big firms, even when they are charging low prices, have an unfair advantage over small rival firms. Some of the prosecutions undertaken under the legislation seem to express this feeling, attacking firms just because of their unique relative size in their industry, whatever their record in prices and competitive practices. Overall, however, at present the status quo seems to allow for processes of innovation and forms of competition that do continually lead to unequal results, unjust for some firms, as well as for some people.1 2.3 The Employment Relationship Some of the things that firms do, justly or unjustly, in dealing with agents and suppliers are done to people rather than firms. Firms also, as we have seen, affect people as consumers through the transactions that they have with them, and they affect people again, taken as members of the public with interests in public health, a safe and attractive environment, and a vigorous cultural life. I shall not treat the impact of their activities on the public as raising questions of justice and injustice. The impact can certainly be good or evil, but the impact is diffuse and cannot be pictured readily as conveyed in transactions with individual agents where the concept of justice is most at home. The one other connection in which I shall treat firms as doing justice or injustice is the employment relationship. Firms are not, even nowadays, the only employers in business. Many people are employed by individual persons, who may act as justly or unjustly in the employment relationship as other firms. But individual persons are no longer the typical employers. Most people are employed by firms.

Justice and Injustice in Business 187 The employment relationship, so far as doing justice or injustice is concerned, runs both ways. Employees can 'rip off firms, or betray them, or sabotage their operations. These are all - in the general way in which we are using 'injustice' - forms of injustice, at least apart from revolutionary situations. There are laws dealing with them one by one, person by person. Whether the employment relationship goes right or wrong in the other direction, too, may be something that falls to the lot of individual persons without systematically affecting whole classes of people. A machinist, working for a small firm making brake drums, may be denied the prevailing pay for his sort of work, even though he is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in good standing; he may not get the same privileges in vacations and hours of work as other workers not senior to him in employment by the firm; or he may not have the same security of employment. Let us suppose he is a prickly fellow and the boss dislikes him. In all these connections, references to what other people in comparable positions - the most comparable being other machinists employed by the same firm - are getting in return for the work establishes in a roughly adequate way what results in the wage contract are to be accounted as equal on the side of the employee. A famous theory - Marx's theory of exploitation - holds that even when the results are equal by this sort of comparison, workers are giving up something (the labour that is the source of the employer's profit) for which under market arrangements they are not compensated. One does not have to accept or reject this theory to recognize that results unequal for the machinist in any of the ways mentioned would be objectionable on grounds of justice. In each case, there is a departure in which the machinist gives up time and effort and does not get a matching compensation, and a move toward justice if the inequalities are avoided or rectified. Avoiding or redressing such injustices might be looked upon as something to be worked out person by person, in individual cases. Noticing the discrepancies between the way in which he is being treated and the way in which other workers are treated, the machinist goes to the boss and points out the injustice. No doubt something like this sometimes succeeds. When it doesn't, one may have to accept it. There is a limit to what can be done by social procedures. Pair by pair, people are inevitably going to be often so ill-assorted in information, temperament, and cunning that one will do an injustice to the other. This will be true so often that only when substantial damage is done will it be worthwhile to set in motion a system of remedies.

188 Moral Objectives It is apparently quite a different matter when whole classes of people can be identified who are subjected time and again to the same injustices. Blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and women have been denied equal chances with WASP males to get jobs in the first place. When they have had jobs, they have had less chance of keeping them and less chance of being promoted. They have also, especially in the case of women (and of blacks in South Africa), got less pay when they have been doing much the same work. In the United States and Canada, systematic measures now check such injustices and provide redress for them. Prominent among the measures are laws that give people rights not to be discriminated against, in respect to employment (and in other connections), on grounds of race, sex, or religion. I have not hitherto mentioned rights. It may seem that rights and justice are so intimately connected that one cannot get very far with the discussion of justice without discussing rights. Certainly, failing to respect people's rights is flagrant injustice; taking them away or purporting to do so may be even worse. Yet I have in fact gone on as long as this discussing justice without discussing rights. This is no accident. The rights against discrimination just mentioned came into being as legal devices new sets of rules - to remedy specific injustices. Evidently the injustices could be detected and condemned in the absence of the devices. They could also conceivably be remedied in their absence. In part, they are so remedied: Among the current measures taken against discrimination, for example, is the prescription that the proportion of people from minority groups employed by a given firm shall not vary greatly from the proportion of such people in the general population. Although justice can be conceived, and done, without instituting special rights, the device of rights nevertheless has certain advantages over alternative devices like prescribing proportions or quotas. It gives employers and employees more room to match jobs with people who have relevant qualifications. It enlists the people affected by discrimination in the task of combatting it. They are given new resources, which so much strengthen them that they now have the power to revoke certain departures unfavourable to them. Whether the injustices of discrimination are remedied by rights or otherwise, remedying them can be looked upon, once again, not as an interference with the market, but as a modification tending to perfect it. One of the chief arguments for such rights is that the people who are being discriminated against could do just as well as the people favoured by the discrimination, sometimes even better, if they were only given a

Justice and Injustice in Business 189 chance to do the same sort of work, whether it is heaving coal or writing computer programs. If this is so, firms practising such discrimination are behaving irrationally and jeopardizing their own efficiency. They are cutting themselves off from part of the supply of suitable labour. Blacks, women, and the other disadvantaged groups mentioned are classes of people readily defined, independently of any injustices done them. It has taken a good deal of agitation to make them visible as victimized groups. Even so, the ease of identification facilitates making the case that they have been, as groups, systematically subject to injustice, and hence facilitates making the case that they deserve to have systematic remedies instituted on their behalf. Are the other injustices that firms may do to employees to be left to measures not taken on behalf of any independently defined social groups? There might still be rights to be resorted to; but, like legal provisions for disallowing unconscionable contracts, they would have been designed to assist any persons who on occasion needed them, regardless of the social groups to which they belonged. Yet at least one other social group may be held to be in need of measures specially designed for it. Let us return to that prickly machinist. Suppose the boss refuses to act on the discrepancies that the machinist points out. Are we really going to write off the outcome as the sort of petty injustice that must be put up with now and then, given the imperfections of human nature and of social arrangements? In fact, the machinist belongs to a visible social group - nowadays by far the majority of the working population - that is systematically vulnerable to injustices of this kind: namely, employees, or more precisely, people who depend on employment for their livelihoods. Compared with employees, employers, even in the private sector of the economy, are relatively few to begin with; and a few of those few are employers of large concentrations of work people. There are thus far fewer alternative parties to a bargain struck about employment on one side of the bargain, and on that side of the bargain there are resources that no employee has - enabling the employers to wait out the bargaining process. The laws against discrimination fall very far short of protecting employees, even employees in the groups most victimized previously by discrimination, from all the injustices that abuses of the employers' greater power can lead to. Other measures of protection do exist. In Canada, the courts will do something to protect any employee against arbitrary dismissal. They may not restore the employees' jobs; but they will exact some form of

190 Moral Objectives compensation, in some cases up to a year's salary. Through unionization, employees themselves have taken their own measures of protection: not only arrangements for collective bargaining, but also provisions for hearing and settling, during the life of a collective agreement, the grievances of individual workers. All the points on which the machinist considers himself unjustly treated could be brought forward as grievances. Unfortunately, for many workers, indeed for most, including professional people and people in managerial positions, no reliable grievance procedures exist. They remain vulnerable to a great variety of injustices at the hands of the people who employ them. 3 Reforming General Features of the Status Quo In section 2, we were concerned with particular sorts of departures, just or unjust, or troubling enough to be close to being unjust, and with features of the status quo that lend themselves variously to fostering, preventing, or rectifying such departures. I left aside the basic question whether the present status quo is currently meeting people's needs equally and giving people substantial chances of having their preferences heeded. I also left aside the threat to justice posed by increases in the inequality with which resources are distributed, and the general threat, in the form of unequal power, posed by the present inequality of distribution. The importance of these considerations to the achievement of justice was made plain in the outline of the theory of justice that I gave in section 1, however, and one cannot assume that modifications in the status quo that check particular sorts of injustice will take care of them. Such piecemeal modifications may leave gross inequalities in current faring standing, even increasing. Nor do they remove the pervasive danger of unequal power, which may be applied in subtle ways (for example, in selecting political candidates and shaping political issues so as to favour people with unearned income) and which continually finds new forms of expression. It is now time to take up, with these current considerations, reforms directed at inequalities of resources and income as such, quixotic as it may be to attack them directly. People, even people who have some reason to be dissatisfied with the present inequality of advantages, may currently have little interest in achieving justice. We may be going through a period in which people are content - some people very content - to live again under the nineteenth-century bourgeois banner 'Enrichissez-vous!' Yet some unrest about justice, including basic justice, persists, and even people who are not going to be moved in the

Justice and Injustice in Business 191 slightest to act against received injustices in the distribution of resources will understand the unrest, and the context of their lives, better if they consider what measures of reform they are rejecting. 3.1 Basic Justice Respecting Needs and Preferences: The Problem

If departures from the status quo adverse to people's meeting their needs and giving effect to their preferences are prevented or rectified, no people will be made worse off by such departures. Some people, however, may have been badly off to begin with, and they may, in spite of these protections, stay badly off, even if social product (GNP) per capita remains the same or, rising, is accompanied by adjustments that maintain everybody's relative positions. With these inequalities, could the status quo be basically just? Does justice require that anything be done about them? The Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, in a widely read recent book inspired by a born-again faith in 'possessive individualism,' has held that justice does not require reducing the inequalities - though his position is qualified to a degree when needs rather than preferences are in question. At any rate, in his view, justice does not require this, if the inequalities have come about, as we allowed in the basketball player's case (1.2), through fair exchange of resources themselves fairly acquired. There is, Nozick acknowledges, a case for reducing the inequalities, if they stem in part from past departures themselves unjust. Should we then trace the history of each present item of property and rectify all the injustices done at earlier stages? But this is absurd (Nozick himself recognizes that it would be very difficult): We are in no position to do all the tracing required, and even if we were, it would not be determinate how present claims to property would be rearranged, since rectifications at earlier stages in the past would open up different possibilities for bargaining at less early ones, and hence many different possible sequences of fair exchanges. If we could identify uniquely what the present arrangement should be, nothing would be more disruptive to society than to try to bring it about. Worse, we can also infer from Nozick's position and our knowledge of history taken together that in all probability the history of acquisition and exchange behind almost every substantial accumulation of private property is thoroughly tainted. Even if on his side the basketball player (1.2) accepted in good faith all the cash offered him by his adoring fans, many of them were not entitled to offer the cash. Either they had done

192 Moral Objectives someone an injustice in getting it or they in turn had got it in a sequence of exchanges originating in an injustice. Should we simply disregard the claims to resources with such tainted histories? In principle, we might be justified in doing so, but, mindful of the social disorders that sudden changes in institutions and expectations generate, proceed very cautiously and slowly in reducing them. We might even, on the same ground, let them stand for the time being. On the other hand, just letting them stand will not save us from disorder. The world of business, indeed the general life of society in the United States, Canada, Britain, and other countries is continually being disrupted by strikes and other forms of agitation for higher wages, which imply that present inequalities are not accepted as just. Unions are not content with simply keeping abreast of wages elsewhere in the industry, or of the wages paid people in occupations that have in the past had wages comparable to the wages of the union members. They aim, whatever the inflationary consequences that sometimes follow, to improve the relative position of the members, as compared with other workers who seem no more deserving, or as compared with people living on income from property. Unions may settle disputes on the basis of received notions of comparability, and on terms that permit firms to make (and distribute) as much profit as before; but they are always ready to start up the disputes again. They do not see why air traffic controllers should not do as well as air pilots, or as judges on the bench; and, without necessarily fuming about the privileges of property owners, they do not see why profits should not be reduced if wages could thereby be made bigger. How can they be expected to look upon the distribution of resources - income and wealth - in the status quo otherwise, so long as they are not convinced that the distribution is in accordance with justice, much less prescribed by it? In the continuing unrest about wages and the inflationary pressure that the unrest implies, business as it is currently conducted continually touches upon issues about the basic justice of the market and of private property. 3.2 Bearing with the Problem or Trying to Resolve It

Workers and unions may be aware, in many cases, of doing quite well from the unrest, and they may hope to do even better in further rounds of agitation and bargaining. (Unionized workers in particular may have chances to improve their positions relative to workers in sectors of the economy not unionized.) People on the other side - for instance, the

Justice and Injustice in Business 193 people who are doing well as property owners - may complain about the unrest, treating every strike as a threat to national survival. In reality they may be content to bear with the unrest rather than undertake stringent measures to bring about anything like a basically just distribution of resources. Moreover, serious efforts to deal with the problem might lead to bitter social conflict. The quest for basic justice, even the quest for agreement on a principle of justice, would very likely break up into as many partisan arguments as there were distinct interests to rationalize and defend. Is there, however, no hope even within the limits of a philosophical discussion of finding a principled solution to the problem? What does justice prescribe (so far as it gives a determinate prescription) regarding the distribution of resources? Some people would say that the principle is simply that resources in any given status quo should be equal; or, more subtly, that, given the variation among people in the amounts they need to be provided with to meet the same needs, that they should give everyone an equal chance of meeting his or her needs. Equality in resources will not be generally convincing, however, at least as things stand, even among people who might gain from it. For those people, too, believe both that some people need more than others and that some people are outstanding either in contributions to society or in derelictions. Most people believe that they should be rewarded or punished in matching departures. Equality in meeting needs, while it is perhaps a principle that most people would find convincing, takes care of only one of these points. Moreover, it does not say what is to be done with what is to be left over after meeting needs, which in an affluent society is a lot, and can generate a lot of controversy. At this point the Difference Principle, made famous by John Rawls, might come forward. The Difference Principle says that there shall be equality in acquiring new material resources (money, income) so long as there is no way of increasing everybody's resources by giving some people more resources, as a reward for contributing to the increase. It recommends (under certain safeguards respecting rights and opportunities that are to be equalized for everybody) inequality if those who will be worse off will be better off than they would be otherwise. I am going to use the Difference Principle in a rough-and-ready way as a means of arriving at a principled solution to the problem of basic justice. Even in this rough-and-ready use, it requires a good deal of adjustment. For instance, workers as well as managers will join in insisting that it must be adapted to discourage anyone inclined to from idly

194 Moral Objectives free-riding on the contributions of the rest. The most attractive way of checking such inclinations would be to instill in everyone a steady desire to contribute, which might in fact be consistent with everyone's accepting equal rewards. Unfortunately, no large or complex society has yet succeeded in instilling the desire in everyone, much less in making people content with equal rewards; even small communes often have trouble doing so. On the other hand, attempting to police people strictly enough to detect and punish every lapse into idleness is invidious, inimical to freedom, and counterproductive. Idleness becomes a gesture of defiance. Moreover, few even among those who are most excited about the abuses of public support are prepared to let people go without food, shelter, and clothing, whether they are idle or not. The worst of criminals in prison are given those things. A possible solution would be to grant that everyone's needs are to be met, though whether they are met in ways that accord with anyone's preferences, and whether anyone's preferences are to be heeded in other matters would depend on the person's making, given the opportunity, at least a normal contribution to production. In other words, the Difference Principle would apply to discretionary income - the wherewithal for giving effect to preferences. This income would vary with the contribution made. So far as external incentives were required for normal efforts, let alone extra efforts, on the part of members of the society, the incentives would be furnished by discretionary income. This solution accords at least roughly with present practice and with improvements on present practice that might well win general agreement - finding jobs for those who want work, encouraging people who are receiving public support to earn some discretionary income. Major questions about the use of the Difference Principle remain. One of them is what should count as a contribution? According to received ideas, a person contributes simply by putting something onto the market, or by investing some money in a going corporation. These do not seem to suit the Difference Principle as well as exertions of special talent. Yet it is difficult to reject entirely the suggestion that people make a contribution by using their property or making it available. In his explanation of the Difference Principle, Rawls himself mentions the contributions of entrepreneurs who bring in innovations beneficial to everybody. But entrepreneurs make their contributions by the use of property; and often, if they did not have the property of their own to use in this way, they might not be free to take the risks involved. I shall take the Difference Principle to allow for contributions by the

Justice and Injustice in Business 195 use of private property only when the property is used as a means of making a full-time effort in which a person's skills and talents are exerted. When she needs more capital than she herself can supply, I shall suppose that she can recruit other property owners to work with her. This move clearly allows the Difference Principle to embrace private property in the means of production. On the other hand, it does not go all the way with private property as now conceived and accepted. Some people - for example, people living idly on inherited property attached to the present way of doing things and able to invoke in their favour some of our received notions of justice, will wish to go further: For them, in effect, if they subscribe to the Difference Principle, they will do so only on terms that may lead simply to endorsing the present status quo. Applied to productive contributions, the Difference Principle is compatible with inequalities of discretionary income as great as those existing now in such countries as the United States and Canada. It might even, given the facts about incentives, call for larger inequalities. Most people who have discussed it, however, incline to think that the facts about incentives are such that the Difference Principle will sanction only much smaller inequalities of income. I shall assume that fulfilling it will reduce the general threat to justice posed by inequalities in the present distribution of resources to a level not only more comfortable but also tolerable in itself (should the present level not be tolerable), and keep the threat in check at that level. Moreover, many people (including members of the intelligentsia) who might persist with the Difference Principle past this point will almost surely fall out soon hereafter, when their own present privileges become threatened. On the other hand, we are still well within the bounds of the received rationale of the status quo insofar as that rationale argues from incentives for personal efforts (such an intense concern when it was a question of idlers on 'welfare'). Furthermore, if instead of asking for agreement by everybody in present circumstances, we ask, 'Whose agreement, from the point of view of justice, is it most important to have?/ we can find a way to go ahead that at least in theory has a prospect of rising above rationalizations of opposed interests. Surely it is most important, as regards the basic justice of social arrangements, to have the agreement of those who do least well in benefits from them. Those are the people who are most likely to be victimized by the arrangements, other things being equal - most likely to have uncomfortably small discretionary incomes; most likely to be intimi-

196 Moral Objectives dated or overreached in bargaining or other conflicts of power. (Other things being equal: that is to say, rebutting one by one such charges as folly, idleness, criminal behaviour, which might imply that their disadvantages were their own fault.) If they freely consent, mindful of their own interests, to arrangements under which they get less in material resources than other people, that is a powerful non-partisan argument, approaching being a necessary and sufficient condition, for thinking the arrangements just. Arrangements conforming to the Difference Principle would invite this consent, for there, by allowing those who get more their extra rewards the people who get least still get more than they would otherwise. However, just what do people require in extra rewards to make extra efforts, or full use of their talents and skills whether or not they make more than a normal effort? It would obviously invite a number of abuses to allow them simply to set their own rates of reward. On the other hand, placing upon them the burden of proof, while justified as a precaution against abuses, does not give them a fully defined question to deal with, or at any rate a question that theory in the social sciences has mastered. People will not know how to go about proving in advance that they will not, if they gain less than they aim at in bargaining, do the work in view unless they get a certain level of rewards. How can they, or anyone else, tell that they are not distorting their prophecies to suit their present bargaining position? An objective answer of sorts is provided by the market in cases where the work involved is something that a number of people compete to do (just as firms compete to have them do it): For then, without any distortion from monopolistic bargaining power on the part of the worker, the worker can expect to get as much as her marginal (revenue) product. It is far from clear, however, that having this amount in wages is indispensable as an incentive. The Difference Principle does not make it clear either on just what terms the people who get more resources are to keep them. Are they to keep them - to go on accumulating them - during their lifetimes, without regard to the increase in power over other people and in other advantages respecting command over goods? Are they to be able to pass them on, as gifts or inheritances? The Difference Principle seems to sanction these things if they continue to contribute to incentives, though over time they may make the points of departure in succeeding status quo ever more unequal, and pose grave dangers of injustice in departures and of troubling results. Under other principles, about liberty and opportunity, Rawls calls for measures to offset these dangers, but those

Justice and Injustice in Business 197 other principles might not in practice hold their own against the processes and effects of accumulation. Could we not take an experimental approach to these issues? One may doubt whether the possibility of leaving accumulated property to successors of one's choice is an essential part of the greater incentive to be offered everyone who is to make a greater contribution. One may doubt, likewise, whether the range of income covered in offering incentives needs be as great as it currently is in the United States and Canada, where the top incomes for people who work for their incomes (as not all do) may be as much as two hundred times the median income of the lowest paid tenth. Perhaps a range up to twenty times, or even three or four times, would suffice to call forth the entire amount of effort now being put forward in business. It suffices for natural scientists and for engineers actually employed as engineers. Is it to be supposed that they work less hard or less intelligently than financiers? (Their skills may be just as rare, too.) If a narrower range would suffice, however, the Difference Principle does not justify a wider range; on the contrary. Nor does it permit being able to pass on accumulations of private property if being able to do so is not an essential part of the incentives to be offered. Maybe it leads to a quandary if inheritance must be allowed for: as an incentive to the legators, it can hardly be essential as an incentive to the legatees. As some thoroughgoing champions of capitalism - more thoroughgoing than most - have remarked, inheritance seems to take away the legatees' incentive to contribute. We arrive, as predicted, at familiar measures - a tax on inheritances and a progressive income tax (that is to say, a tax that takes proportionately more the higher one's income). The measures may be familiar. However, they have yet to be made effective; the will to make them effective may have faltered, as current proposals in the United States for a flat-rate income tax suggest. So it has been of some importance to renew - in the perspective of current faring as well as in the more novel perspective of threats to justice from unequal power - the arguments for the measures. How far the Difference Principle, as a means corresponding to those arguments, and the taxes mentioned, as a means of serving the Difference Principle, will actually carry in effective reforms depends on experiment. Taking an experimental approach, governments might proceed in stages to eliminate inheritance (except maybe to allow widows to stay on in the family home, or farmers' children to carry on the family

198 Moral Objectives farms). The stages might be taxing away half any inheritance received in a first period, then taxing away three quarters of any received in a second. After each period one could look to see whether the social product or the rate of innovation had fallen. Again proceeding in stages, governments might reduce by a system of progressive income taxes the range of net incomes, first from two hundred times to one hundred times, then from one hundred times to fifty times, and so on. No attempt would be made to lower or to raise people's ranks in income, but the increments of income in ascending the ranks would diminish; and the discretionary incomes of those at the bottom might rise from transfers. After each stage, again, one would look at various statistical indicators to see whether net adverse effects were occurring. Some effects might be favourable to overall social income and to the rate of innovation: Less resentful, people whose income had risen relatively might put forward more effort; less willing to be harried, people might work less stressfully - and live to work longer. Other effects would not be favourable. When, in either connection, inheritance or income, adverse effects began substantially and persistently to outrun the favourable effects, the society would have arrived in the vicinity of correctly applying the Difference Principle. Would these experiments be feasible? There are difficulties about measuring the effects (though if there are, they argue as much against supposing that the present distribution of income and wealth is a commensurate return to contributions as against trying to find another distribution that would do better). The effects may be too subtle, too mixed with the effects of other causes, or too slow in coming, to detect at every successive stage. If the composition of social income changes as an effect of the changes in the distribution of income and wealth, price-index problems about comparing the social product at one time with the product at another would come up. There are, furthermore, very likely to be grave difficulties about carrying through the changes in distribution in the first place: Those who stand to lose income would emigrate, or evade taxes if they stayed at home, or refuse to work as a protest against the experiments. These difficulties, however, might be considerably reduced by proceeding very slowly, so that, for example, at no stage was the change big enough to provoke emigration or evasion or 'job action,' and every change was fully digested and adapted to before proceeding to the next. The difficulties about measurement would be mitigated, too, by allowing time to sort out the effects of bringing in the Difference Principle

Justice and Injustice in Business 199 from the effects of other causes and time to establish which effects were after all persistent. Price-index problems might become intractable as time passed, but with any luck, they would not undermine comparisons of social income after one stage of the experiments with social income before that stage, and they would not become intractable at any greater rate than they would in the absence of the experiments. Something might be made of the Difference Principle even if it were not possible to go all the way with it: Social policy might be required, if it made any move on the subjects that the principle applies to, to move in the direction of applying it rather than elsewhere. I do not think, however, that full application, so far as the experiments outlined with inheritance and income amount to full application, would be unfeasible, given time and care and steady resolution. It may be objected that even with the range of incomes greatly deflated - brought down, say, to five times the minimum - some of the people drawing top incomes may not be making commensurate contributions, while some of the people making incomes at the bottom may be contributing incommensurately much. This is true, and it shows that though deflating the range until adverse statistical effects appear might bring the society closer to applying the Difference Principle than before, it would not have come close enough to eliminate all injustices in the status quo. Yet the magnitude of the injustices would have been substantially reduced; and if it was desired to eliminate the injustices that remained, headway could be made in doing so by various supplementary measures. In some cases, it might help to correct for imperfections in the market, for example, to make sure of an adequate supply of people with protracted professional training, a commission on long-run manpower (personpower) requirements might take actions to encourage or discourage people from entering upon such training in any given year. Among the actions would be measures to vary the lifetime income to be expected after completing the training, or to vary the terms on which student loans were to be repaid. It may be objected, too, that even with the range of incomes deflated indeed, even with the finer corrections just alluded to - the range might still be so great as to give some people troubling advantages in power. In effect, to get more discretionary income (the discretionary income that they had to start with, plus any additions from transfers occurring during the process of deflation), people at the bottom of the range may be risking abuses of power by those at the top. Can we really count on the people at the bottom to be so mindful of their interests as to keep this

200 Moral Objectives risk within safe limits? They would have to be abnormally alert if they are to do so. They might also have to be unexpectably agreed on the comparative values of more discretionary income and greater safety from power. These problems are too complicated to try to settle here. I shall have to be content with pointing out that successful application of the Difference Principle in the experiments that I have described would reduce existing inequalities of power, so far as these depend on unequal wealth and income. Would a society in the vicinity of correctly applying the Difference Principle, with measures being taken to refine the application, find itself outside the bounds of capitalism and private business? I do not think so. It would even be within the bounds of capitalism and private business as most people in the United States and Canada currently conceive of it - in theory. To be sure, the United States and Canada have not eliminated inheritance; not even Great Britain has. Canada, except for Quebec, does not now have any tax at all on inheritances; and the tax in the United States is, I believe, easily circumvented. Nor do the United States and Canada have fully effective progressive income taxes (to say nothing of having tax systems that taken as wholes are genuinely progressive). The idea of having both inheritance taxes and progressive tax systems is, however, familiar, and even, in theory, generally accepted. The theory of the market economy, as it applies to the effects on incentives of inherited wealth, has already been alluded to. The theory applies in favour of a progressive income tax insofar as such a tax corrects for imperfections of the market, which is the case here, since the measures mentioned (when they do not in effect reintroduce the market) correct for imperfections that lead to people getting more income than they require in incentives. (A progressive tax on expenditures, which would encourage capital accumulation and treat earned incomes more fairly, might be even more effective, though it is less familiar.) To prevent the government from putting its hands on more funds than it has the capacity to use wisely, furthermore, all of these taxes might be modified to include devices to encourage the diffusion of resources in private hands, including credits for gifts to charities and (within limits for each recipient) to private persons. Whether any sustained drive to achieve the justice that would be achieved under the Difference Principle will ever be generated is an entirely different question. Most people, especially when, as assumed, their needs are met, would not want to consume their lives in pursuing justice to the end, and a good deal of injustice will probably persist to

Justice and Injustice in Business 201 the end of time because of this lack of zeal. People in business might ask themselves now and then whether they do not benefit from this accident of circumstances. If they do, would it not be good grace on their part to adopt a more generous attitude toward egalitarian reforms of the distribution of income and wealth? Should they not also recognise that, so long as they are not ready to carry through measures to make the status quo fully just, and just again after correcting for the relevant effects of future departures, they have no grounds for holding that strikes and other forms of pressure for higher wages are out of place?2 Bibliographical Comments on the Several Sections 1.1 Hobbes actually said, 'The definition if INJUSTICE, is no other than the not Performance of Covenant' (Leviathan, chap. 15). By 'covenant' he means a mutual undertaking for an exchange of goods and services where at least one party has yet to perform. He recognizes, as Gregory Kavka has reminded me, that circumstances may change so that one party or the other cannot be expected to perform, in particular so that it might become too dangerous to do so (chap. 14). For Hume's contention that single acts of justice upholding claims to private property are 'frequently contrary to public interest/ see A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Section II. 1.2 Notoriously, the example of the basketball player (Wilt Chamberlain) is treated by Robert Nozick, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 160-4, to exactly the opposite effect given it in the treatment here. To Nozick it is intuitively clear that justice could in no way require the player to give up any of his gains. William T. Terrell has impressed upon me the point that governments tend to abandon the market system very quickly when events jeopardize meeting basic needs. 1.3 For the logical difficulties of aggregating preferences in direct democracy, see Amartya K. Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: HoldenDay, 1970); in representative democracy, Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), esp. 127-8. Sen gives a comprehensive discussion of the questions about social choice raised by Arrow's startling Impossibility Theorem, published 1951. On the incapacity of the market to reach an optimum in which public goods are present, see John G. Head, Public Goods and Welfare (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), esp. chap. 3. The Vancouver real estate operator and the mining financier mentioned in this

202 Moral Objectives section figured in Peter Newman's recent book The Acquisitors (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981), in passages cited subsequently by Alan Fotheringham in his column in Maclean's. 2.1 James S. Coleman devotes an illuminating short book - Power and the Structure of Society (New York: Norton, 1974), to the complications for ethics and behaviour imposed upon natural persons by the rise and proliferation of firms and other 'corporate actors.' 2.2 No Bibliographical Comment. 2.3 Marx's theory of exploitation can be found in the first volume of Das Kapital. Its outline can be quickly and conveniently appreciated by reading the selections from Das Kapital in Part II, Sections A and B, of Robert Freedman, Marx on Economics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961). A quota for the employment of a racial minority is one of the things aimed at in the prescriptions of the collective agreement at issue in the case of United Steelworkers v Weber et al, decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1979. The decision upheld the agreement, in which the union and Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Company had evidently been strongly encouraged by government officials to adopt the idea of a quota. Courts in the United States do not seem as ready as courts in Canada to act against arbitrary dismissal, even of long-service employees. Compare Innis Christie, Employment Law in Canada (Toronto: Butterworths, 1980), chap. 7, which bears out what I say in the text, with Alvin L. Goldman, Labor Law and Industrial Relations in the United States of America (Deventer, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1979), 72-6.1 owe information on this point and the reference to Christie's book to Professor Arthur L. Foote of the Dalhousie University Faculty of Law. Neil Chamberlain, in his essay, 'The Corporation and the Trade Union,' in Edward S. Mason, ed., The Corporation in Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 122-40, at 133, stresses the establishment of grievance procedures as an undisputed benefit of unionization. 3.1 Nozick's book has already been mentioned (see note on 1.2 above). The phrase 'possessive individualism' and the conception are C.B. Macpherson's, made famous in his lively book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 3.2 On the advantages of unionized workers in 'the monopoly sector/ see James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin's Press, 1973), chap. 1.

Justice and Injustice in Business 203 Raw Is treats the Difference Principle mainly in section 13 of his book, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 75-83. The contribution of entrepreneurs is referred to, for instance, on 78. The other principles that Rawls relies on to offset the dangers of injustice arising from the accumulation of wealth are chiefly the principle of equal liberty, treated at 61 and (more extensively) in chap. 4, and the principle of fair equality of opportunity, treated in section 14,83-90. On the present range of incomes in the United States, see Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoffff (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1975), 68-9. My assertion about a range of 200 times is a safe inference from the data in that passage. For Canadian incomes, see Lars Osberg, Economic Inequality in Canada (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981), 15-17. James P. Sterba, in his book, The Demands of justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), relies as I do on a different treatment for needs and for discretionary income, and arrives by a different route at much the same modifications of the Difference Principle. He has some especially interesting things to say about the consequences of allowing for some people at the bottom who may prefer leisure to having any more discretionary income. I owe to Daniel Cullen the point that the Difference Principle at least thrusts the burden of proof upon those who get greater rewards (or upon their apologists). Contemporary champions of capitalism who think inheritance must be curtailed include Charles K. Rowley and Alan T. Peacock, in their book, Welfare Economics: A Liberal Restatement (London: Martin Robertson, 1975), chap. 7. They are also the source (at 157) of the suggestion that rather than have the government take more in taxes, inheritances might be reduced by encouraging people to spread their legacies more widely and transferring inheritances above specified limits from unduly favoured heirs to voluntary charities. The standard case for supplanting the familiar principle of a progressive income by the principle of a progressive expenditures tax is made by Nicholas Kaldor, in his book, An Expenditure Tax (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955).

Notes 1 Firms may also be the victims of injustice not only on the part of other firms (and other persons) but also on the part of governments. Sometimes firms that have made the most reliable bids for government contracts are passed over because governments unjustly favour other firms; sometimes firms are singled out for harassment by governments. These are important matters, but I already have enough to discuss in treating justice and injustice among people and firms in the private sector.

204 Moral Objectives 2 Colleagues and students of the department of philosophy at Dalhousie University heard me deliver a preliminary version of sections 1 and 3 of this essay at a departmental colloquium in September 1981.1 am grateful to them for their comments, and especially to Robert Martin, Brian Penrose, Peter K. Schotch, and Terrance Tomkow. I am grateful also to Alasdair Sinclair of the department of economics at Dalhousie and Gregory Kavka of the department of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, for reading through my draft on impossibly short notice and forestalling some egregious errors and omissions. (Others may have appeared since.) I must also thank Tom Regan, the editor of the volume in which this essay originally appeared, for many useful suggestions; and Nicholas Rongioni, whose comments, several of them well taken, I have responded to during final revising. Another discussion of some of the central ideas of the present article, viewed in a different perspective and developed in ways not attempted here, can be found in my paper, 'Making Justice Practical,' in David Braybrooke and Michael Bradie, eds., Social Justice (Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy, 1982), 1-14. It was written after the present article reached near-final form, though it came into print first. It follows in the present book.

10

Making Justice Practical

No doubt present social discontents do not arise solely because of the absence of a consensus upon social justice; nor would arriving at such a consensus cure all the discontents. Whatever we do about justice, it is going to be uncomfortable to adjust to shortages of energy. There is, however, a sort of unrest that is continually manifested in union demands for higher wages, continually rising, without limit in principle, and that blocks any serious attempt to control inflation by the sort of policy recommended by economists who recognize the political aspects of inflation, namely, an incomes policy. This sort of unrest, I think, could be reduced, even in the end eliminated, if we managed to achieve, Canada for its part and the United States for its, a consensus upon social justice. To do so, however, we shall have to bring the concept of justice down from the level of idealized philosophical discussion; we shall have to make the concept fully practical, and to do so, we shall have to make it fully current. By full currency, I mean giving an account of justice that meets three tests: First, the test of being readily understood by ordinary people, let us say, at least by people capable of reading comprehendingly most of the contents of a good newspaper; Second, the test of giving determinate results, rejecting some policies Reprinted from Social Justice, ed. D. Braybrooke and M. Bradie (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy, 1982), 1-14. Copyright © 1982 by the Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, and reprinted by its permission.

206 Moral Objectives and favouring others, on the issues actually encountered in the real world, and, moreover, of giving results that make sense of the ideas that ordinary people already have about justice; Third, the test of attracting steady support from ordinary people, taking them as they are, in positions more or less privileged, and thus with different interests at stake in the status quo. The third test we may expect to be the hardest to meet, even if we qualify it (as I shall) to apply only to people who are ready to justify their agreement or disagreement by appeal to relevant reasons. Most of the accounts of justice now in circulation manage as well, however, to fail one or the other of the first two tests, more or less badly. All accounts of justice that make use of the notion of utility fail the first and second tests. This is so not just because utility, even before its refinement by economists and decision theorists, was, and was from the time that the felicific calculus was first proposed, a technical concept that has no use in ordinary life. It is so because the concept has no application in practice to the choice of social policies and never will, apart from serving as a convenient device for making certain points that can be made better with more familiar concepts, or apart from serving as a sort of variable that in practice is replaced by those familiar concepts. In truth, the notion must be conceded to have played an effective historical role in resolving the paradox of value (how can water cost so little and diamonds so much, when the first is so much more useful than the second?); in preventing people from making mistakes like Hobbes's in arguing from a partial coincidence of a monarch's interests with his subjects' to an identity of interests; in justifying progressive income taxation by explaining why taking $100,000 from someone with $200,000 in income is not equivalent to taking $1,000 from each of 100 people each with $2,000 in income. All these points are better made, however, at least once they are discovered, without resort to the notion of utility, and by talking instead about (for example) people's capacity to meet their needs or to advance their interests, beyond meeting their needs, in getting more income. It is an illusion to suppose that we can draw up utility functions for the people affected by social policies. Even if we had a fully satisfactory procedure for drawing up utility functions for single persons, taking them one at a time, which we don't, we are not actually going to do it in even a single case; it never has been done, and it never will be. Moreover, were it done, we would, in the most promising case (following von

Making Justice Practical 207 Neumann's and Morgenstern's procedure) face intractable problems of interpersonal comparisons. We can, of course, make interpersonal comparisons relevant to questions of justice, but they are not precise comparisons, and they are not comparisons of utility. Theorists - economists or philosophers - who use the notion of utility continually forget these things, and they continually overlook the fact that should anyone attempt to apply their theories, the information about utility is gong to be absent. People will resort instead to information about needs and provisions for needs, or about money incomes, or about market-basket indices of real income. Information organized by such familiar concepts was the information used to apply utilitarianism to sanitary reform in London; it is the information that is used in lieu of utility whenever utility is brought forward for practical application. It would be better to bring forward the familiar concepts in the first place. The leading contemporary accounts of justice also fail the first and second tests by making use of an idealized model in which some sort of idealized original position figures. I am using the term 'original position' in a generalized way, to cover any status quo, hypothetical or historical (or both together), supposed itself to be free of injustice, and supposed therefore to offer suitable circumstances for initiating processes that will conform to justice if certain conditions, specified in the model, are adhered to. The position may be one in which, as with Rawls, agents choose the principles of justice behind a veil of ignorance; or one, as with Nozick, in which people confront the riches of nature without yet having appropriated or misappropriated anything; or one, as with Gauthier, in which fully informed agents, identifiable with members of present-day society, proceed under conditions closer to Nozick's original position than to Rawls's to bargain about features of the social contract.1 Philosophers themselves have some difficulty in understanding just how these models make the results arrived at in them compelling either in theory or in application. And how can they be applied if, as in Nozick's case, they require us to retrace the history of mankind in impossible detail to a position that cannot be uniquely identified anyway?2 The hypothetical reasoning involved in the models is not just a complication that ordinary people find difficult to follow, though it is that; it inevitably opens up a gap between the account of justice and present-day facts. Ordinary people can appreciate that there is a gap without being able to tell just why it exists; so they, in the end rightly, must suspect the accounts of being to some degree irrelevant to present issues.

208 Moral Objectives Finally, for present purposes, I note that all accounts of justice that rely upon pure procedural criteria alone for determining the distribution of income and wealth - of advantages in general - fail the second test. For procedures alone, certainly the procedures of competitive markets, do not forestall the development of end results that conflict in themselves with ordinary intuitions about justice and that jeopardize keeping up the very procedures relied upon. Neither Nozick nor Gauthier, for example, provides against the possibility that one person, with a monopoly, let us say, in a very popular and easily marketable talent, could come by the aggregation of transactions individually legitimate to be entitled to 99 per cent of the Gross or Net World Product. But end results far short of that fantasy will raise disturbing questions about the provision for some people's needs and the jeopardy in which they and the procedures have been placed by the aggrandizements obtained by the people most successful under the procedures. It is no answer to this point to imply that everyone should be on his toes, fully engaged in the market everyday. If everyone were so, the procedures might turn out to be self-defeating notwithstanding; and on what grounds are even those with limited zeal for trading to be forced to be traders to protect themselves? Most contemporary accounts, besides failing the first and second tests, fail the third one, too. Many readers have thought that Rawls's account, by leaving a gap between the agents in the original position, who do not know what privileges they may have in present-day society, and agents who are conscious of their privileges, fails to motivate people in the real world who would lose substantially by carrying out his principles. A much worse difficulty, in my view, is the fact that in the absence of a good empirical theory of incentives, people with present privileges can argue that the Difference Principle is already satisfied, since (so they say) the privileges are necessary to them as incentives for their (supposed) social contributions. Almost as bad is the difficulty that the application of Rawls's principles might require as much sacrifice of people's present positions, acquired under expectations of legitimate continuance, as the principle of utility ever would. (Consider the effect within the least advantaged stratum of maximizing the mean or median income there.) Yet, Rawls's account is, in respect to the third test, much closer to being fully current, in spite of these difficulties, than Nozick's is. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Nozick's account, if it were followed in practice, would require the most radical unsettling of

Making Justice Practical 209 the present distribution of wealth that anyone this side of Marxism has ever contemplated. All present holdings, we must hypothesize, are tainted to some degree by misappropriations in the past; all those misappropriations must be traced, and their results undone. People will find it difficult to agree to doing this, not being able to foresee in most cases what they will lose or gain in the end, and not being convinced that justice requires going back to Attila the Hun and beyond to resuscitate long-superseded grievances. The amount of time and distraction that the research would demand is by itself a decisive objection, though subtler ones can be found. Gregory Kavka, examining closely3 Nozick's Rectification Principle, has shown in effect that Nozick faces a dilemma: Either he has to ascribe some value to people's simply existing and accept it that for them when their existence depends on past actions, however unjust, the Rectification Principle is vacuously satisfied; or he has to work out some procedure for hypothetical comparisons of people's condition, with and without the effects of any questioned actions, in which case he loses any advantage that he purports to have over Rawls's and others' hypothetical constructions. Above, of course, I treated Nozick as in effect having no such advantage anyway, since his argument postulates an idealized original position in a hypothetical model, though a different position and a different model from Rawls's. I am not saying that the accounts of justice rejected by my three tests are all of them rejected as beyond repair. Some of them are much closer, at least in certain features, to being fully current than others, and I shall in fact make use of something like Rawls's Difference Principle in my own attempt at full currency. Nor am I saying that being fully current is the only thing to be valued in an account of justice. On the contrary: a theory of justice can be very illuminating philosophically even if it flagrantly fails all three tests. Such is the case, for example, with Gauthier's account. It may not be fully current. It nevertheless shows us more more than any other account so far of the relation between self-interest and morals - about the limits to which non-tuistic rational choice can be pushed in an effort to capture the chief points of morals for a theory of mutual advantage that itself begs no moral questions. This, and other achievements of these accounts, are not at issue in charging them with failing to be fully current. Let me now set forth the main features of an account of justice that I claim does have full currency - or at least will, once it has been perfected. It is an account that (unlike many others) treats distributive justice in a unified perspective where other aspects of justice equally figure.

210 Moral Objectives It is an account that dispenses with the notion of utility in favour of the concept of needs and some related concepts. It is an account that keeps the actual status quo in the real world in view at all times, with impending transformations of it, rather than relying on hypothetical reasoning, an idealized model, and an original position very different from the status quo. It is an account that does not rely, anywhere, on pure procedural criteria alone; everywhere in it procedures are subject to check, offset, and supersession by non-procedural criteria. Thus the account has some promise, by avoiding the objections that I have raised to other accounts of meeting the three tests; and I think that the extent to which it does meet them will emerge quite naturally and incidentally in the course of my exposition. We begin with the actual status quo, the distribution of wealth, positions, and entitlements in (say) Canada or the United States today. For short, I shall often speak of the distribution of 'advantages/ Then we consider possible departures from this status quo - examples of departures that are already happening. To simplify exposition, I shall concentrate upon transactions, leaving aside many other sorts of departures, all of which raise questions about justice (which, fortunately, can be given parallel treatment): gifts, productive contributions, savings and dissavings, extortion, natural disasters, taxes, subsidies. For the moment, I raise no questions about the status quo itself. I ask, what is just or unjust about transactions departing from it? There is, I think, remarkably firm and widespread agreement about the clear cases of injustice in transactions. A transaction is unjust when one party misrepresents the goods that he offers so that after the transaction the one who misrepresented gains, and the other party loses, relatively to the positions that the parties held in the status quo. Or a transaction is unjust when one party hands over the goods or performs the services agreed upon and the other hands over less or does less than agreed upon, perhaps nothing at all, so again the status quo has been changed to the advantage of one party and to the disadvantage of the other. On the other hand, predictably enough, we regard a transaction as just if the two parties end up equally well off in comparison with their points of departure in the status quo. 'Equally well off is something judged to be such with a good deal of elasticity. We generally defer to the parties themselves: If they both consider that they have done equally well, we count them as doing so, though we find it hard to conceive (for example) how anyone could rationally pay so much money for a dusty stuffed owl. If one or the other party is dissatisfied after the event, we

Making Justice Practical 211 have, of course, to look around for other standards. We ask whether they have either of them changed their minds, which would explain the dissatisfaction consistently with holding the transaction to have been just; or whether either was misinformed, with the other taking advantage of the misinformation, which would make the transaction unjust, among other things by the failure of the equal results criterion; or whether the discrepancy in the value of the goods or services exchanged was so great, by ordinary standards, as to raise questions about the competence of either party to arrive at equal results. I do not underestimate the complications of individual cases or the frequency with which people will disagree about them. Nevertheless, clear cases of transactions both just and unjust can be found; and there is general agreement not only about the judgments that they invite, but also about the considerations on which they rest, which are the same considerations to be brought up in discussions of the less certain cases. Next, I point out that transactions clearly just in themselves, taking them one by one, may mount up in the aggregate to troubling results. Let us consider Wilt Chamberlain once more; he may stand for anyone who reaps a fortune by enjoying for a time a monopoly on some talent or device whose time has come. (See L. Thurow, in Generating Inequality, on the random occurrence of fortune-making ventures and the vanishing frequency with which people who succeed with such ventures succeed again with anything of the sort.)4 Every individual transaction in which a fan pays $6 or $7 to see Chamberlain play is innocent enough on both sides; hence, considering its origin, Chamberlain's aggregate success in amassing much more money than any of his fans might have to begin with does not seem unjust. On the other hand, considering what Chamberlain is now in a position to do with his greatly superior advantages, the result is troubling. He is now in a position to outbid any of his fans for scarce vital resources; in a position to drive hard bargains with any of them, much more favourable to himself than to the other party; in a position to exert power over them by hiring specialized agents to press his particular interests by whatever means are most expedient.5 In short, he is in a position that poses dangers of unjust transactions in the future, indeed unjust departures of all kinds; and that puts in jeopardy the very processes (in this case fair exchange) relied on to achieve just results. It is true that he may be blocked from using this power nakedly. A vigorous democratic tradition in politics and a tradition in the courts of cherishing liberty may set firm limits to the power that any one person, however rich, can exert over others. Such traditions may even set some

212 Moral Objectives limits to the exercise of the power by a combination of rich people, on the basis of class interests. In this connection, however, one may chillingly recall that democratic and libertarian traditions may not survive hard times; Chile and Uruguay used to have respectably democratic governments and (especially Uruguay) progressive social policies, in spite of a very uneven distribution of advantages. When the crunch came, it was not the uneven distribution of advantages that gave way to liberty and democracy. Moreover, one might bear in mind the persisting anomaly that in supposedly democratic countries like Canada and the United States the features of the tax system that are progressive (in the technical sense) are largely undone by exceptions valuable to the rich and that in those countries the tax system as a whole may be regressive. There are also a lot of diffuse and miscellaneous ways in which greater advantages translate into the exertion of power: For example, the rich have much more use of the courts, and much more prospect of success there; and they can even use the courts to harass other people. It is true, too, that notwithstanding the dangers of such increased advantages, many people, perhaps most, would consider that such things as greater security and greater bargaining power are legitimate rewards of success in the market. Can it be unjust for someone to try to earn enough in the market to protect herself thereafter from (say) the vicissitudes of employment and unemployment? I think, however, that this consideration goes no further than to allow for some limited inequality in advantages, while as things stand the advantages that Chamberlain amasses in one round confer upon him an extraordinary lead in amassing advantages in the next one. He not only has his talent to sell again; he has money to invest. The popular impression that the easiest and surest way of making a lot of money - of amassing relative advantages - is to have a lot of money to begin with is quite correct. If entrepreneurs rarely if ever have a second idea good enough, and lucky enough in timing, to make a fortune from scratch, they can readily console themselves with the thought that they don't need a second idea once they have a fortune in hand (see Thurow again).6 Advantages and with them discrepancies in power are thus cumulative. A pretty powerful argument, which the disadvantaged are bound to find appealing and the advantaged inescapable, thus emerges for doing something to check the growth of such discrepancies, even if this means undoing aggregative results that originate in transactions just in themselves. Sooner or later, those discrepancies are going to pose intolerable dangers to the people who are on the short end of them, and all along

Making Justice Practical 213 they pose dangers of undermining to a greater or lesser degree the justice of transactions between people on either side of them (and of justice in other respects, too). I say, 'Doing something/ How much is to be done? How much scope is to be left for inequalities in advantages? Or to put the same question the other way round, how close an approximation to equality is to be sought? I shall begin answering this question in a moment. At this point I want to observe that the same argument which emerges for checking the growth of unequal advantages, in departures, or in a succession of departures, from the present status quo, can be turned against the distribution of advantages in the status quo itself, provided only that these are judged to be already sufficiently unequal to pose unacceptable dangers. If we can agree on how close an approximation to equality we require to reduce those dangers to an acceptable level, justice will (in our eyes) call for the present status quo to be at least as close an approximation besides calling for any future status quo to be. How close an approximation to equality shall we require? But let us ask first in what sense are we to understand the equality to be approximated. Shall it be literal equality - the same income, property of the same value, property of the same composition - for each? Perhaps; but even more attractive, I think, is the idea of having equality far enough at least to ensure meeting basic needs, where we allow for some variation from person to person in minimum standards of provision. Some people, for example, need more food to keep going, and not merely because they are bigger or doing harder work. I assume here that agreement can be reached both on a small finite list of basic needs and on minimum standards of provision for them. Besides food, clothing, shelter, exercise, rest, companionship, sex, and recreation would figure on the list. If any items are seriously challenged, they could just be dropped, though it would be reasonable to ask first what case could be made for ascribing them as universal needs on the basis of rebuttable presumption. Equality in meeting needs is attractive, I contend, not only because of the intuitive moral appeal of meeting needs and (consequently) relieving suffering, which is by itself as immediate as anything that comes up in ethics, and not only because of connections between needs and rights and between needs and deserts. (We may assume some condition about being willing to contribute to producing provisions, so far as so contributing is feasible and called for. Actually, free-riders, who fail to contribute while enjoying the benefits of others' contributions, stand condemned without the assumption, as participants in unjust departures other than transactions.)

214 Moral Objectives Equality in meeting needs is attractive because people who apprehend not having their needs met are especially vulnerable to exercises of power by other people. Now, I suppose that people who give any weight at all to equality and to meeting needs will have grounds for insisting that the cumulation of discrepancies in advantages be checked somewhere, and that an upper bound for discrepancies must be no further out than is consistent with everyone's being assured of having her needs met. But even people who give no weight to equality at all and none to meeting needs per se will, because of the special vulnerability of people whose provisions for needs are put in jeopardy, have a compelling reason to agree that the upper bound must be consistent with meeting needs, and hence with equality in that respect. Equality in that respect, however, may, in fortunate enough circumstances (which I am assuming), leave a surplus of some sort - uncommitted resources and the goods and services that can be produced with them. How shall this surplus be divided? What is at stake in dividing it is in a sense less consequential than what was at stake in making sure that people's needs are met. People are not so vulnerable to threats affecting gains or losses of items from the surplus, and in this respect the danger that greater advantages will translate into abuses of power is less for the division of the surplus. But it is still a real danger: Even people who are ready to renounce comforts in order to maintain their integrity and freedom in the face of threats have reason to fear that other people can be manipulated by comforts into cooperating with oppressors. Specialized agents could be hired on that basis. Moreover, not only are the sacrifices of comforts likely to be painful in their way to the people ready to make them; the sacrifices that they face once power is aggrandized and abused on the basis of comforts may extend into provisions for their needs. They are not going to be able to count on being free to lead a simple life of contemplation and creative activity; they must fear finding themselves locked into hard labour in the silver mines. At this point, we might again raise the possibility of dividing things with literal, physical equality, the most convenient form of which would be an equality in wealth or money income. Many, perhaps most people would, however, think that equality could be improved on by allowing inequalities conforming to the nerve of the Difference Principle: Let there be unequal shares of the surplus left after meeting needs so long as those who get more are contributing to increasing the amounts received by those who get less. Now, there is no logical connection between conforming to this principle and reducing discrepancies in advantages to a

Making Justice Practical 215 level (span) that poses only acceptable dangers of the abuse of power. Moreover, the present inequalities in the United States and Canada, whether or not they pose acceptable dangers, are conceivably wholly in conformity with something like the Difference Principle; conceivably, they fall short of the inequalities that such a principle would license and prescribe. In the absence of a well-founded empirical theory of incentives, one can hardly tell, and a priori there is all the room that bad faith might require to defend the present distribution on this point. I turn to the Difference Principle, however, as a further means of obtaining full currency: The less advantaged will readily agree to it, and it anticipates the most promising and the most familiar defence of unequal incomes by insisting on the test that the defence implies. Furthermore, I suspect that on experiment the present inequalities would turn out to be far greater than the Difference Principle, applied to the beyond needs surplus, licences. Is it really plausible to suppose that Frank Sinatra, say, would sing less well and less often if he got $50,000 a year or less? (Suppose he did; we could hire another singer.) Or pay comparable to that received by General George Marshall when he directed what may have been the greatest organizational feat in history - within the space of three years training something like 10 million men in all the variety of specialities required in a modern army, equipping them, and flinging them around the globe? The claim that the top managers of the great automobile companies must have the incomes which they have if their organizational feats (such as they are) are to be forthcoming seems to me quite specious. (It is even to some extent directly belied at the moment by the behaviour of Lee laccoca, renouncing pay and emoluments while he tries to turn Chrysler around.) The claim that they and others must, in addition, have the right to transmit the wealth that they amass to people who will not be required to do anything at all to increase the national product seems not just specious, but absurd. We can find other ways of bringing about the accumulation of capital, too. In any case, let the matter be put to experiment: Suppose it was arranged, for example, to apply the Difference Principle to the surplus in the following sequence. (Inheritance might be attacked in coordination, simultaneously or in an overlapping sequence.) One year, the discrepancies in income would be reduced by (say) 10 per cent. Then let several years elapse and at the end of them see whether either the overall amount of the surplus or the amount going to the least advantaged stratum had fallen. For this purpose - rough evidence of the effects on incentives and productivity - the mean or median of the income going

216 Moral Objectives to the least advantaged stratum, though not a reliable criterion for anyone choosing in the original position, would serve well enough. If, on balance, the effects were not unfavourable, a second 10 per cent reduction would be carried out. Again, the effects would be observed after the lapse of several years; and, again, if the effects were not unfavourable, a further reduction would occur. And so on. When the effects began to be unfavourable, the time would come to ask whether any further reductions would be required to eliminate dangerous powers, or whether these had been incidentally to the pursuit of the Difference Principle brought down to an acceptable level.7 At that time, too, one might consider reducing the dangers without necessarily reducing the inequalities. Some forms of distribution unequal overall to the same degree (by measures of range, standard deviation, or the Gird index) might be safer than others. Until the Difference Principle is (roughly) fulfilled, however, reducing inequalities would be the justice-favoured route on which to reduce their dangers: it accords with one fully current consideration, and it is required by another. Is this scheme, and the approach to justice involved in it, practical? I am not going to try to say whether, as things stand in Canada or the United States, it is likely to be adopted. I will make two points in defence of its practicality, first a point about the possibility of agreement, second a point about organizing the political effort. There will be, I presume, little difficulty in getting the least advantaged to agree to the approach, once they understand what it involves and are convinced that the reaction in other quarters to trying it will not be dangerous. It is true that some confusions will have to be overcome, and some degree of acceptance of the existing discrepancy as legitimate. Jennifer Hochschild has evidence suggesting that the acceptance, which is very mixed as it stands, would disappear with the confusions.8 People in other quarters - among the more advantaged - are in no position to argue against the approach. They are not, as I said earlier, in any position to argue against precautions establishing some limit to the growth of discrepancies in advantages. Nor are they in a position to argue against the experiment with the Difference Principle; for just their main defence of their greater advantages has been the defence of incentives to contribute, which the Difference Principle accepts. They might, alternatively, try to defend themselves by taking an intuitive stand on sacrosanct property rights. This does not seem a promising position - it brings into question their good faith in being ready to justify their disagreement by arguments; it does not (at least in Nozick's

Making Justice Practical 217 version) offer a fully current view of justice; it ignores the jeopardy in which the accumulation and concentration of advantages puts the very rights held sacrosanct. Of course, people with such advantages now may find all sorts of ways of confusing the issues and of dragging their feet, but I am not sure that one can say a priori they will reject the arguments. Jennifer Hochschild has evidence suggesting that not all of them would.9 May they not concede the argument, but sabotage the experiment? They might simply emigrate, for one thing. I assume, however, that the experiment would be carried on at such a sedate pace that in no one move would the more advantaged be so drastically affected as to prompt large numbers of them to emigrate. The experiment, if it is to move at a sedate pace, may take ten, twenty, even thirty years. Even ten years is a long time, one may think, for any government to pursue a large-scale goal steadily. Actually, I think there may be many examples, in policies about water supplies, or reforestation, metricization (in Canada), and the space program (in the United States), of the steady pursuit of fairly large-scale goals, even of steady pursuit through a sequence of stages laid out in advance (tentatively). None of them, it is true, concern anything so basic to the social structure as the distribution of personal advantages or anything that poses such a challenge to present privileges and vested interests. Yet, once started on the experiment, the bureaucracy might keep it going unless the experiment was countermanded; and if the government remained more or less continuously during the period in the hands of one party (as it has done in Canada), the countermanding might never effectively come. So what is mainly needed for the organized political effort to occur is for a party that is capable of coming into office and staying there to take it up. Is it politically attractive? The availability of the arguments that I have used figures somewhere in its attractions, but I expect that at the moment that is an attraction which operates indirectly. The direct attractions lie in the suggestion that nothing effective is going to be done about inflation (no incomes policy) or productivity or morale in Canada or the United States unless each of those countries achieves a new consensus on its common enterprise and that this consensus is not going to be forthcoming without an agreed-on approach to justice. Both countries may have to pay more attention to justice if either is going to be again the success that it used to be.10 Note, 1998 This essay was written for delivery in what people had begun to call 'the Rust

218 Moral Objectives Belt' in the early 1980s. Since then productivity has advanced in spite of apprehensions widespread at the time; there is even a boom going in the United States (not, alas! so much in Canada) that combines sharply reduced unemployment with little in the way of inflationary pressures. But these successes have come along with great increases in the inequality of income; and the dangers that inequality poses or portends for justice continue, though as yet they may be manifest more in the increasing grip of plutocracy on national policies than in abusive behaviour by particular persons. The remedies for inequality outlined in this essay and the preceding one may have less scope now than they used to, before current trends toward economic 'globalization' had gone so far. However, it is still possible, as the comparison of Canada with the United States shows, for one country to impose much heavier income taxes than another without intolerable flights of wealth and people; and it is still possible, as the comparison of the United States with Canada shows, for one country to impose taxes on inheritances while another imposes none. Whether the experimental, incremental reforms that I describe would be more successful than moving immediately to the levels of taxation required for adequate redistribution is an empirical question to which I do not bring any empirical expertness, but I guess that it would. (See my discussion of Jennifer Hochschild's evidence against incrementalism in the next to last chapter of the present book.)

Notes 1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: 1971); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: 1974); David Gauthier, in a number of articles to be consolidated in a forthcoming book - see, for instance, 'Rational Cooperation,' Nous, 8 (1974), 53-65, and 'Social Choice and Distributive Justice,' Philosophia, 7 (1978), 239-53. In ascribing an original state of nature to Nozick, I am assuming (perhaps precariously) that he would accept as presuppositions of his doctrine some contingent facts about the past, such as that there was a time before which there were no human beings on earth. 2 Here and below I may seem to be too precipitate in finding a determinate Rectification Principle in Nozick. It is true that though he acknowledges the need for a Rectification Principle, he never tells us exactly what form it will take, and in the only passage (152-3) in which he discusses the subject at any length, he intimates that to arrive at a determinate form, a number of problems about effects on intermediary parties will have to be solved. I hypothesize that trying to solve these problems by calling for anything less than undoing all past violations of his principle of justice in acquisition and of his principle of justice in transfers would forfeit the intuitive appeal of those

Making Justice Practical 219 principles. A statute of limitations that left standing privileged positions originating in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries would not work, nor would a statute that ran back to just short of 1066. 3 In a paper, 'An Internal Critique of Nozick's Entitlement Theory' [Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63,4 (October 1982), 371-80]. James Fishkin adopted much the same approach in the conference at Bowling Green University where the present paper was delivered. 4 Lester C. Thurow, Generating Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 142-54. 5 Jennifer Hochschild and Michael McDonald combined to persuade me that it was somewhat anachronistic (in the United States and Canada), and hence less than fully current, to speak of people hiring 'bully-boys' or 'henchmen.' I have substituted 'specialized agents/ 6 Thurow, 153. 7 In discussion, James Fishkin pointed out that it is possible, if the most productive people have to be offered little or no extra income as an incentive to maintain the same benefits to the least advantaged stratum, and extra benefits to other strata somehow disappear during the shrinkage experiment, the result of fulfilling the Difference Principle might be to reduce everyone to equal income at a low level. The main thing to say in reply is that the assumptions about incentives and leakages are empirically very improbable (which Fishkin concedes). One might also fall back on the Difference Principle in lexical form (Rawls, 83), reformulating it as required to safeguard Rawls's intention of not sacrificing gratuitously income to any stratum and to make sure that, in application during the experiment, GNP was no less at any stage than at the stage before. 8 See her book What's Fair? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 9 Hochschild, 165-81, 221-8. 10 The basic account of justice given in this paper, and the argument arising within the account for reducing inequalities in advantages, can also be found in a long essay of mine, 'Justice and Injustice in Business,' in Tom Regan, ed., Just Business (New York: Random House, 1982). [Note, 1998: reprinted on pp. 164-204 in the present book]. There it is elaborated, even on some basic points, in ways not attempted here. Here it is commented upon, in the context of an explicit discussion of full currency, in ways not attempted there.

11

The Common Good (with Arthur P. Monahan)

More can be made of the notion of the Common Good than ethical theorists in the twentieth century usually allow, more (somewhat oddly) than some current theorists demand, preferring to leave definition to participative procedures in changing contexts, more indeed than natural law doctrine before its eclipse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries troubled to make explicit. Worked out with due amplification, the notion does not just accommodate the goods in which people have a common interest; it indicates how the pursuit of such goods can avoid setting people at odds, and the indication is more promising than anything utilitarianism or contractarianism has to offer. St Thomas Aquinas, to whom we look as a standard source for the medieval conception of the Common Good, did not confront utilitarianism or contractarianism; nor have latter-day exponents of a stereotyped Thomism distinguished the notion thoroughly from the ultimate standards for social policy invoked in these theories. Putting together the clues that St Thomas has left, however, shows that the Common Good specifically rules out a number of prospects licensed by utilitarianism and insists on things that contractarianism at best brings in as contingent super-additions to the basic plan of justice. It agrees more with utilitarianism than with contractarianism in concerns not restricted to human beings in any subset of the human race. Yet it roots ethics and social policy in attitudes and motives about mutual aid to which utilitarReprinted from Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (New York: Garland, 1992), vol. 1,175-8. Copyright © 1992 by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker and reprinted with their permission, the permission of Arthur P. Monahan, and the permission of Garland Publishing.

The Common Good 221 ianism, though making a demand in some respects more sweeping for personal sacrifices, is not entitled so long as it accepts personal utility functions varying every which way. For its part and to its ultimate embarrassment contractarianism, requiring no more than self-regarding calculation, allows these attitudes and motives to be put aside during the choice of principles of justice. The Common Good demands much more in commitment than this. In the traditional doctrine of natural law, laws are authentic and morally obliging only when they accord with the Common Good. The community, under such laws, offers the sole milieu for attaining the fullest personal happiness. St Thomas says, 'As parts of the full life of a community, all human beings fall into subordination to the common happiness in a way properly expressed in law.' This is clearly incompatible with the individualistic reckoning required by contractarianism. It takes as settled, moreover, a question that utilitarianism deliberately leaves open to determination by contingent facts. Though they are familiar with antisocial behavior, theorists of the Common Good refuse, for purposes of working out an ethics, to contemplate the possibility that human beings might be fully happy apart from the subordination asserted. Yet they do not, as utilitarianism is commonly understood to do, require personal sacrifices whenever a net gain in happiness benefiting only other people can be had. Utilitarianism, in its own way opening up too much room for calculation without fellow-feeling, also prescribes that individuals maximize their self-regarding benefits whenever doing so leads to a net addition to happiness in the group. The Common Good might often endorse the results of such a calculation, but only when, like the calculation itself, they reflect the character of a person already fully socialized. Not only can social training produce such persons (though training sometimes fails); ethics must have them. The Common Good is a notion strictly correlative to this conception of human beings as social in orientation. It does not require any hypothetically prior calculation of the benefits of life inside some community as compared with life outside any; nor does it require justification by such a calculation. Commitment to it springs not just from mutual need and interdependence, but from the combination of these things with friendship. 'Greater love than this no one has than to lay down their life for their friend.' The friend may refuse the sacrifice; or contend to make it himself. In any case, commitment to the Common Good requires personal sacrifices only when these are indispensable to the maintenance of an organized community. However, the commitment excludes continu-

222 Moral Objectives ally scanning the horizon to see if leaving would increase one's value income, and it stands firmly against cutting and running when the commmunity faces calamity. Vikings are coming up the river, and there is only a fighting chance the villagers will be able to withstand them; nevertheless every villager is bound to stay. Nor, important as such military cases have been in history, does the Common Good require people to run such risks only in war. Floods and pestilence supply equally compelling occasions for common efforts. In other cases the risk disappears, but a personal sacrifice is still in order. Consider a community in great need of sanitary engineering, with only one young person likely to get through an engineering course. She would rather spend her life bearing children and quilting comforters. The Common Good forbids such self-indulgence. Though it is a means to benefits essential to their happiness, it is also an end that all members of the community must promote; it thus calls for individual assignments to work that make the best of their capacity to help the community thrive. Here a notion developed in twentieth century economics is helpful, which only Rousseau, of all the great exponents of the Common Good, came close to making explicit, though it fits smoothly into the tradition. In all the examples just given, in which the Common Good gives results that rival notions do not give, or cannot guarantee, public goods - preserving the village; eliminating sources of infection - are visible, the enjoyment of which by one person does not preclude equal consumption by others. With private goods, on the other hand, consumption by one person thus far prevents consumption by another - if Eve had eaten the whole apple Adam could not have consumed even a part. Can we define the Common Good as consisting simply of the public goods open to pursuit by the community? In the cases illustrated, the goods all answer to what from time immemorial have been recognized as basic human needs; in this, as in other respects, the Common Good has universal relevance. Its relevance extends, in a sentiment that echoes the Acts of the Apostles (4:32-6) and reflects monastic practice at its best, to the furthest point of Marxist doctrine: Trom one and all according to their ability, to one and all according to their need.' To define the Common Good properly in full accordance with this sentiment, however, there must be more of a break with individualism. Everyone derives a personal benefit from a public good - their share, not interfering with others' shares, of public safety, for example; and conceivably this benefit could suffice with some people to incite the pur-

The Common Good 223 suit of the good. For St Thomas, however, the Common Good implies a commitment understood as transcending individualism in several dimensions. Understanding the community to be the natural and necessary vehicle for pursuing public goods and meeting members' needs, every member understands that every other has the same commitment to stick with the community even in times of exigency; at least everyone takes the others' commitments into account in the sense of taking them for granted, as each may take their own. Perhaps again without formulating the thought consciously, everyone understands that for human beings life in a community with such mutual commitments and expectations is a precondition - a necessary condition, though not a sufficient one, which circumstances may not allow - of personal happiness. At any rate, according to St Thomas, following Aristotle, all this is the way things will turn out if the members substantially realize the program of motivation and action laid before them by nature and expressed in natural law - a program at once for individual members and for the community, which can thrive in a way attractive to all of them only by manifesting and drawing upon such mutual commitments and expectations. Thus the Common Good is by definition common in its mode of pursuit as well as in the character of its object. Aristotle's account of the Common Good emphasizes friendship, by which he meant something closer to the intensity of blood brotherhood than the looser modern meaning of the term, and makes friendship the supreme virtue of social and political life. St Thomas enlarged this view in a direction away from sex bias and sharp divisions between friends and others by connecting friendship with the Christian virtue, love of God and neighbour: Loving one entails loving the other. Moreover, God is the embodiment of the Common Good in a community large enough to incorporate all human beings. Here God serves St Thomas as a conceptual resource that functions theologically as both the supreme value for human beings and the spiritual energy generating community feeling, as well as the ultimate authority prescribing natural law. A secular account must depend on community feeling as something readily cultivated by suitable training. It is not perhaps much worse off for that, however, since believers like St Thomas would regard the training, which includes the educative function of human law, as indispensable, and would treat its success as evidence of God's assistance. Besides the attractions of the public goods that it embraces, the Common Good gains some attractions from private goods that inseparably accompany the public ones - besides the village saved with its shared

224 Moral Objectives communal life, one's own house saved from the torch along with the village; besides a community spared pestilence, one's own cup filled with pure water. It will not impair the definition - or strain its connection with friendship and mutual commitment - to include these private goods. Moreover, some private goods find their way into the Common Good without requiring the company of specific public ones. Mutual concern that members have enough in private goods to meet their needs will be one expression of their mutual commitments and their friendship. Another will be mutual concern that work whether on public or on private goods, earning in either case justly proportional entitlements to private goods, be steady work under decent conditions (with, for example, regular days of rest). In these two concerns taken together, the members discover another public good - the community as an instrument for fulfilling humane purposes respecting needs, work, and entitlements. As such, it is an aspect of the Common Good for those who are in need and helped; it is so, too, for those who want the help to occur though they are not in need themselves. Here, full attachment to the Common Good rises far above self-interest. People fully attached rejoice to have laws and institutions that meet the needs of their fellow citizens. They rejoice, too, in the attachment of other citizens to the Common Good, and not merely because it is useful to themselves to have those others so attached. They value the attainment through that attachment at once of happiness and virtue by the others. They rejoice in living in a community that thrives by their sharing commitment, attachment, and rejoicing with the other members. The Common Good may in these connections require personal sacrifices to provide private goods to other people, but such sacrifices will always also work toward providing public goods, as when, giving up proteins and vitamins to infants, adults try to ensure that the community continues. Friends and relations may go beyond the sacrifices required of them by the Common Good of the overall community. The common good of a family or of a set of friends may have components more intimate than anything to be sought overall; and these intimate components may vary with the variation in life plans that the Common Good of the overall community would, given a suitably liberal interpretation, encourage. Indeed, acknowledging the variation in human temperaments, the Common Good, understood as it must be to favor personal happiness whenever circumstances permit, may insist that there be room for this variation in plans. Here the Common Good has a formal character to be specified by autonomous personal decisions, pos-

The Common Good 225 sibly very divergent ones. The decisions, to be sure, would have to be consistent with attaining the public goods that the friends and the family members have at stake with other people in the overall community. Clearly life plans for persons or sets of persons that ran counter to the Common Good would have to drop out; but so would some have to drop out in deference to the Greatest Happiness or to contractarian principles of justice. There is no reason to think that the Common Good could not consort just as well with a rich diversity of life plans as the goals sought by these alternative doctrines. Can the same view of the Common Good be reached simply by generalizing upon the goods that a set of people hold and use in common along with the goods that answer to needs which they have in common? The first correspond to the public goods on which the present account puts so much weight. The second correspond to private goods, but only roughly, since the two sets of goods intersect: Some basic needs are met by public goods, as the need for peace and security is met by having a system of law enforcement. The present account accommodates both sorts of goods, the first directly, the second, by way of the mutual commitments of the citizens to one another's welfare, and the associated public good of having some system under which the citizens can meet their needs for private goods. Given the mutual commitments, moreover, the accommodation has built-in safeguards against familiar sorts of conflict. The fact that people have a certain need in common does not by itself prevent them from struggling against one another to meet it. People can even come into conflict about which public goods to fund, and at what levels. Do they want to have public broadcasts of classical music? What level of police protection do they need? The present account makes paramount the principle that such issues are to be settled by making sure that the community thrives in a way attractive to all its members, at once drawing upon and reinforcing their mutual commitments. Thus the Common Good coordinates personal objectives relating to needs, including the need for work, along with personal life plans, and reconciles these personal objectives in some general plan of cooperation for the community - or at least narrows the choice to a set of such plans. It would be a doubtful departure from tradition to try elaborating the standard offered by the Common Good so fully as to settle all such issues in advance. If people are to have the choice of a rich variety of life plans - and not only for this reason - they will do well to keep open room for attention to specific opportunities in specific contexts. Even

226 Moral Objectives without further elaboration, however, it is clear that the Common Good moves in a direction that neither contractarianism nor utilitarianism may take, and settles some issues that they settle differently. The Common Good considers all the sources of happiness that utilitarianism allows for, without accepting that it has to deal with all the aggregative patterns of happiness that utilitarianism licences. For utilitarians the Greatest Happiness is the supreme public good even when aggregated over a miscellany of individuals each isolated in a pleasure cell. Adherents of the Common Good hold that human beings, given their nature, can only expect to be fully happy within a community of multiple mutual concern. On the other hand, adherents can accept in the main the contractarian insistence on personal autonomy and meet contractarians halfway in setting up guarantees against personal sacrifices. They achieve these guarantees in reverse order, however, making sure of community first, erecting barriers to sacrifices afterwards. Annotated Bibliography Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, 8.1155al-1163b28, on friendship. Politics, 1.1-2, 1241al-1252b40, subordination of the individual to the community. Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Acute exposition, distinguished by thorough knowledge of criticisms both philosophical and jurisprudential. Gilby, Thomas. The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. pp. 237-50. Personal and Common Good in the context of Thomas's political theory. Head, John G. Public Goods and Public Welfaree (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1974). Standard treatment of the theory of public goods. Maritain, Jacques. Scholasticism and Politics, trans. Mortimer J. Adler, 3rd ed. (London: Geoffrey G. Bles, 1954), 45-70. Distinction between individual and person to show both subordination to community and transcendence of it. Nemetz, A. 'Common Good,' in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGrawHill, 1967), vol. 4,15-19. Strong account of the conception of the Common Good in current church doctrine. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contrat social (1762). Precisely how public goods come into Rousseau's conception of the Common Good and its relation to the General Will is brought out in David Braybrooke, 'A Public Goods Approach to the Theory of the General Will,' in J.M. Porter and R. Vernon, eds. Unity, Plurality and Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 75-92. Zev M. Trachtenberg, in Making Citizens: Rousseau's Political Theory of Culture (London: Rout-

The Common Good 227 ledge, 1993), gives a sophisticated treatment of the General Will in the light of the theory of public goods. Suarez, Francesco. Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores (Naples: 1872), vol. 1,161-70. Post-Reformation, pre-Hobbesian statement of natural law theory and need for individuals to be under political authority for the Common Good. Thomas Aquinas. 'De perfectione vitae spiritualis/ in Opuscula Theologica (Turin: Marietti, 1951), vol. 2, lllff. Chapter 13, in English translation, Vernon J. Bourke, ed. The Pocket Aquinas (New York: Washington Square Press, 1960). The community of all human beings under God. Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Thomas Gilby et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1965-74), vol. 28 (1965), Ia2ae, QQ. 90-6. On law, especially natural law and positive law; subordination of individual to community. (Q. 90, art. 2); vol. 34 (1974), 2a2ae, QQ. 23-7. On love (charity) and its relation to friendship.

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PART II

RULES

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This part of the book and the part to follow will, I trust, be seen to fit together quite nicely. Part II shows how rules come to bear throughout social life, generating persistent demands in ethics and establishing persistent features of social practices. Part III moves on to consider how these features change (and, along with them, the demands of ethics) with changes in rules. How do these two parts fall in with the first part of the book? It could not be claimed that there is an argument arising in Part I that leads compellingly to the subjects of Part II. But that could not be claimed for the fit between Part II and Part III either, though attention to change naturally follows attention to stability. They, like Part I, collect a diversity of essays unified chiefly by visiting and revisiting the same themes. Is there a unity of themes between Part I and Part II (or Parts II and III taken together)? The transition from moral objectives to a focus on rules may seem arbitrary; it is palpably abrupt. There is a unity of themes notwithstanding. Rules continually came into view in the discussions of Part I - just before the break between the parts, the rules laid down by natural law giving rise to commitments and expectations conducing to the Common Good; earlier, rules for justice, rules for assigning work, and rules about participation. If the transition seems arbitrary, it is because readers rightly feel that there were other paths to take on exiting Part I and may think some of them more immediately congenial. Some readers would want to inquire how far the moral objectives discussed in Part II have won the attachment of the general population and how far they have been realized. (These readers would be social scientists rather than philosophers.) Some readers would want to inquire whether some foundational principle could be found that justified those moral objectives. (These readers would be philosophers. Perhaps they would want to know more about whether the Common Good, as treated above, could serve as such a principle.) A path closer to the one taken here would lead to a discussion of moral education. This would lead to a discussion of rules by way of the question how far moral education should rely on inculcating rules. But Part II takes us to rules more directly. Rules not only go hand in hand with moral objectives. They are means of realizing the objectives, and even figure as objectives themselves. (For example, it may be a moral objective to have a rule that assures people security of life and limb.) Moreover, rules supply in Part II a subject that bridges between the predominantly moral concerns of the first part and the concerns of social science - diachronic social science or (in a sense) scientific

232 Rules history - in the third part. For rules are not only, sometimes for the better (when they are efficient and indispensable in advancing moral objectives), sometimes for the worse (rigid and redundant, even when they are intended to advance moral objectives), important to ethics; they are a mainstay of social science. They are a chief preoccupation of social science in one of its two main styles, interpretative social science, and willy-nilly presupposed by the style of social science for which quantities and causes are the chief preoccupation, not rules. So this part of the book moves from an essay on the place of rules in ethics to an essay on their place in social science, waiving for the moment the distinction between synchronic and diachronic social science.

12

No Rules without Virtues; No Virtues without Rules

1 The Campaign for Virtues The double-branched thesis in my title puts on a bold front, and it is meant to be bold enough to arrest attention. I shall actually treat the thesis very cautiously. The title, bold though it may be, is not just ambiguous, it is (to borrow a term from French philosophy) polysemic to a degree that embraces more possibilities than I have counted, certainly more than in a very selective sampling I shall treat. Among these possibilities is a very easy way of making the thesis come true, in both branches: It is to say both rules and virtues have a place in ethics; if you take up ethics, you will find that they both come in the taking. They come with the territory. This is conceded, I believe, in the campaign that in the last several decades some philosophers have waged against rules, on behalf of virtues.1 What the campaign objects to is not giving rules some place in ethics, but giving them an unduly prominent place, so that virtues become, at most just dispositions to obey moral rules (Maclntyre, 216), perhaps just incidental features of keeping up rules, perhaps features lost from sight, as may happen when what is to be done is seen stereotypically as an issue, sometimes a quandary, about which rules to follow (Pincoffs, 19-20,34-5). The most radical objection raised in the campaign for virtue - an objection that tests the concession according to which rules have after all Reprinted from Social Theory and Practice, 17 (Summer 1991), 139-56. Copyright © 1991 by Social Theory and Practice. Reprinted by permission of Social Theory and Practice. Originally delivered at a conference in honour of Edmund Pincoffs at the University of Texas at Austin.

234 Rules a place in ethics - consists in asking where are these supposed moral rules to be found? Where is the corpus of moral rules to which all morally enlightened people assent? Where has it been codified, and who keeps the record of the code? The scepticism expressed in these questions targets not just ideal rules for an ideal community of strict compliance,2 but also moral rules, less ambitious in precision perhaps, but still firm enough to be analogues of real laws or real administrative regulations (Pincoffs, 30-2). Grave objections rise in the campaign against rules about the incompleteness of any account of ethics that is cast in terms of rules, to the neglect of virtues; and about the excessive rigidity of such an account, along with the suggestion of systematic precision on unique and exclusive foundations (Pincoffs, 56, 58, 67-8). Characteristically, the champions of virtue are concerned with personal choices rather than social ones. Laws and regulations would be more at home, respectively, with the legal point of view and the administrative point of view, though some of the arguments against rigid systems for decision making have arisen for social choices too.3 The champions of virtue consider that the picture of personal choices assumed in a rules account is more often than not a false one. People do not ask themselves, what rule shall govern my choice, or how shall I resolve this apparent conflict of rules bearing upon the choice? They ask themselves, what choice befits a morally sensitive person - the sort of person that I want to be? The apparatus of rules assumed in the rules-account is not even present to the mind in typical cases of moral choice, and the choice does not proceed by casuistry applied to such an apparatus. A rules-account inevitably overformalizes practical reasoning (Pincoffs, 118); if its implication that one mode of practical reasoning applies over the whole field of ethics were accepted, it would obliterate the variety of modes of reasoning actually used, maybe as many different modes as there are different virtues (Pincoffs, 59). If such reasoning did take place within an apparatus or system of rules, the system would be an incomplete one. The people using it would continually be encountering issues that the rules in hand did not anticipate, and the formulas of the rules that they did have in hand would prejudice an intelligent resolution of the issues by giving clearcut, rigid instructions - sometimes instructions clearcut, rigid, and conflicting - that were not responsive to the novelties in the issues presented. Given the conception of a rule ethics that the campaigners for virtue have in mind, I wholly sympathize with the objections about incom-

No Rules without Virtues; No Virtues without Rules 235 pleteness and rigidity. Moreover, I would not deny that the conception fits reasonably accurately the ethics of Kant, some accounts of utilitarianism, and some accounts of contractarian theory. It fits all too well natural law theory as it came to be applied in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its rigid prohibitions of extra-marital sex, of contraception, and of abortion. Those prohibitions, with their rigidity, can be got out of St Thomas (see, for example, ScontraG, III, 122, against emitting semen without the intent and the prospect of procreation), less readily in respect to abortion than in respect to the other issues (since the soul is not imparted until some months after conception).4 They are prohibitions that suit St Thomas's rather heavy-handed use of the notion of biological function, a use of the notion of function that Pincoffs would repudiate as 'teleological' (Pincoffs, 6). They do not so easily fit a natural law theory that takes the function of morality to be the advancement of human welfare, given the nature of human beings and their circumstances, in a community organized for just that purpose. This function, too, is prominent in St Thomas's theory, and much that he says about rules applies to rules serving this function, in ways that fully anticipate the objections to rule ethics brought up in the campaign for virtue. St Thomas wrote at length and often about virtues as well as about rules.5 Virtue is for him a disposition that operates in actions;6 and he follows St Augustine in holding that it is a disposition that always has good results.7 One might take this to be an idealized view, implying that the dispositions in question could be realized only in ideal circumstances. One might take Aristotle's doctrine similarly: If every virtue strikes just the right balance - the mean - between the actions that would be forthcoming from two objectionable and opposite dispositions, and strikes the right balance every time, then one might suppose, we need ideal human beings, in circumstances of perfect information, circumstances moreover perfectly susceptible of management, to have any instances of the virtues. But neither philosopher idealizes to this degree. Both consider that virtues actually show up in human affairs. If in relevant circumstances someone does something untoward, we never ascribe it to the operation of a virtue. In every case, the virtue is perfect, but people do not manifest it perfectly; Aristotle would add that we could only identify instances of it approximately even in persons who perfectly realized it.8 The trouble with this approach is that, besides complicating the use of virtue terms unduly and unnaturally, it never allows us to identify a virtue with a disposition that in principle we could infer from psychologi-

236 Rules cal facts alone. I shall, like Pincoffs, take a more flexible view. Virtues are operative dispositions that may on occasion lead the people who have them to do objectionable things. We may, as Pincoffs says (92-3), have too much of some virtues; kindness may be misplaced; we could have too much of frankness. People, moreover, may properly be said to have a given virtue, even if they lapse occasionally in exhibiting it. Hector comes down to us as a prototype of bravery; but, brave as Hector was, to avoid for a time facing Achilles and his doom, Hector ran round and round the walls of Troy. Certainly if lapses are not going to remove people's title to virtue, the occurrence of questionable cases - borderline cases - should not jeopardize the title, however they may act in resolving the questionable cases. St Thomas is clear that we can identify moral rules, though the rules at best fit human affairs imperfectly. Where is one to look for rules? St Thomas's answer is that they are to be looked for in the law, supposing that the laws in question have been properly arrived at (ST, Ia2ae, 90; 91,3; 95,2). (Given their legislative source, there is no doubt about the Ten Commandments being laws properly arrived at [ST, Ia2ae, 95,5].) This is still a good answer, or at least the beginning of a good answer. It is harder than sometimes thought to find laws that are merely conventional, with no instrumental relation to the common good. There are moral rules that fall outside the law, either because they have not been considered for enactment or because it has been deemed inexpedient, indeed counterproductive, to enact them (for example, taking a charitable view of others' failings). But most of the most important moral rules lie in the intersection between the corpus of laws and the corpus of moral rules. Whether or not the whole corpus of laws lies there, it is a mistake to separate moral rules from laws to the extent of thinking of them as separate corpuses; a mistake, too, to think of the separate-corpuses view as a necessary feature of a rule ethics. (Both A. Baier [213-14] and Pincoffs [20-5] tend I think to treat it as a necessary feature; but an adherent of rule ethics could equally with them reject the notion that morality consists, outside of the law, in a separate corpus of rules - certainly St Thomas would). There is broad agreement across cultures on what moral rules are most important to uphold, and in every culture in which there is a distinction between moral rules and laws those most important rules are embodied in laws - in laws, for example, against murder, theft, breach of contract. So the champion of moral rules need not be at a loss where to turn to for leading examples of rules or for the code in which these rules are recorded.

No Rules without Virtues; No Virtues without Rules 237 St Thomas, we can infer, would acknowledge that the corpus of moral rules, like the corpus of laws, is incomplete, at least to the extent that we have discovered it; for we have not deduced every rule that we could deduce, much less enacted every rule that could be deduced. The rules all belong to one system, and can do so even if they hold only approximately, since deduction (going by a result of Dana Scott's, relayed to me by P.K. Schotch9) presupposes only elementary logical conditions that approximate truths may satisfy; and these conditions, we may suppose, apply straightforwardly to deductive relations between what von Wright calls 'normative statements' (which assert that specified rules obtain)10 and at least by analogy to whatever approximation to deductive relations that we wish to recognize between rules themselves (allowing that as such they do not have truth values). The system of rules, moreover, may be, as St Thomas would expect, a consistent one. Yet, far from attempting to set forth even the core of natural law as a deductive system, even in the broad and simple outlines given by Hobbes,11 St Thomas does hardly more than gesture at the presence of a system; in effect, he makes no more of deductive relations than to point out that it would be inconsistent in some specific cases not to hold one rule if another, more general one, holds (see, for example, ST, Ia2ae, Q. 95,2). St Thomas is explicit in emphasizing that every moral rule must be considered incompletely formulated (ST, Ia2ae, 96,6).12 It must be incompletely formulated because we cannot foresee all the particular issues and situations that will call for exceptions to the rule or law in question. Moreover, according to St Thomas, it is best formulated incompletely, even to the extent of omitting to mention all the exceptions that we can foresee; to mention all those exceptions would detract from the imperative efficiency of the rule formula - 'create a muddle.' The rule (a rule with moral significance because it aims at the security of the community and hence at the common good) is that during the present siege the city gates shall be closed at sunset. The time has come to close them today, but the gatekeeper can see a party of the city's soldiers, returning from a sortie, hotly pursued by the enemy. Does he shut the party out, and leave them to fall into the hands of the enemy? Imagine the gatekeeper's doing so. The next day the city council calls him before them and asks what on earth he thinks he was doing. He defends himself by citing the rule formula: The gates shall be closed at sunset. The council would think him crazy to have crassly misunderstood the rule, though the rule did not come with exceptions mentioned. Properly

238 Rules understood, the rule was not to be applied so rigidly. Properly understood, it and any other rule must in application be adjusted to circumstances. Literal application will sometimes defeat the rule and its purpose. But this leads directly to an argument for the first branch of my double-branched thesis. 2 No Rules without Virtues St Thomas's commitment to moral rules - to the laws of natural law carries along with it a commitment to the special virtue of adjusting rules to circumstances, a virtue that, since it is not readily named in English, or for that matter in Latin, must go by a Greek name - epieikeia (ST, 2a2ae, 120). The rule is that one must repay a loan when it falls due; but epieikeia dictates that it not be repaid when someone has gone mad and would put the money, or the borrowed article, to evil use.13 It is a virtue according to Pincoffs' definition - a determinable disposition, which will take different courses in different circumstances, but which is all along a ground for preferring to deal with persons who have it rather than with persons who do not (Pincoffs, 78-80). Hence, taking the first branch of my thesis - 'No rules without virtues' - as a slogan, St Thomas subscribes to it by upholding rules only on the understanding that they are to be administered with epieikeia. If you want, with the champions of virtue ethics, to insist that morally sensitive conduct is not to be reduced to mere rule following, but exhibit skilled and subtle judgment, this is where St Thomas joins you:14 epieikeia is a virtue superior to abiding rigidly by rule formulas; or, as he is equally ready to say, it is the virtue of abiding by the rules, taking into account their aim of promoting the Common Good along with the inevitable incompleteness of their formulation. Unfortunately this is a virtue that (like others) people manifest only in varying degrees in situations that call for it. Often it is a virtue conspicuous by its absence. We might suppose that in some unfortunate societies it is absent entirely. So epieikeia will not support the first branch of my thesis in another sense in which it can be taken: The existence of rules implies the existence of virtues. This is, true, ambiguous until we insert quantifiers; I insert them to produce the assertion that the existence of any rule implies the existence of some virtue. Epieikeia cannot serve as that virtue. However, a virtue that will serve is easily supplied. It is the virtue that St Thomas calls 'justice' (in the broadest sense) and that we call 'law-abidingness.' Aristotle, whom St Thomas follows very closely here, says that being just (8(Kouo