Jon Mandle: 'Rescuing Justice and Equality' by G. A. Cohen

Over the course of the more than 400 pages of Rescuing Justice and Equality (RJE) G. A. Cohen provides a relentless, sophisticated, and insightful critique of elements of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is refreshing, therefore, that early on he takes a few pages to express his great admiration for Rawls's work, stating his belief that "at most two books in the history of Western political philosophy have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice: Plato's Republic and Hobbes's Leviathan" (RJE 11). These remarks helpfully clarify the spirit in which his critique is presented. His criticisms are powerful ones, but they are intended to be constructive -- part of a common project to get things right. This is what serious philosophical engagement should be like. I will only be able to sketch the bare outlines of a few of the many meticulous and fine-grained arguments that he offers. Although I do not agree with the main criticisms he advances, there are many arguments with which I do agree, and even where I disagree, Cohen does a great service by clarifying what is at stake and exploring the range of options available.

The first five chapters rehearse and elaborate Cohen's critique of the Rawlsian difference principle. Much of this will be familiar to those who have followed Cohen's work, since three chapters are revised versions of previously published articles. Still, it is useful to bring them together as they complement each other and form a sustained argument that Cohen extends in significant new ways. The following three chapters -- together with an appendix replying to critics -- abstract from the content of the principles of distributive justice and address the more meta-ethical issue of the relationship between fundamental normative principles and rules of social regulation. The first of these chapters was previously published while the others are new.

Each of the book's two parts relate to Rawls's work in different ways. Cohen presents the first part of the book as an immanent critique of justice as fairness. He argues that Rawls's account of distributive justice is motivated by two competing considerations -- equality and efficiency -- and that his position is ultimately a failed attempt to reconcile them. Cohen recommends embracing the impulse to equality while holding that efficiency is a factor extraneous to justice properly understood. Sometimes efficiency may override justice, but when it does we should recognize the sacrifice for what it is. The second part of the book, in contrast, is simply a rejection of Rawls's claim that "Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all", and of his view that stability and publicity are desiderata of principles of justice (TJ 398). Here, apparently, Rawls simply gets it wrong, and there is little to salvage. At best, Cohen holds, Rawls gives us rules appropriate for social regulation, not principles of justice.

Cohen's initial critique of Rawls's use of the difference principle is well-known. He holds that Rawls misapplies the difference principle when he restricts its application to the design of the basic structure. A more thoroughgoing egalitarian would hold that it should also apply directly to the actions of individuals and inform the ethos of a just society. Assuming that the basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity are protected, Rawls allows structural inequalities in income that serve to increase the share of primary goods of the least advantaged social position. An inequality might do this, for example, by inducing some individuals to engage in more productive work than they would without the additional incentive, thereby increasing the total social product, some of which is then used to benefit the least advantaged in absolute terms. But, Cohen points out, those individuals could choose to forego the additional incentives and engage in that same more productive work. If they did, the least advantaged could gain even more since the money that would have been used as an incentive could itself be divided equally. If justice requires citizens to aim to maximize the good of the least advantaged, they should do this not only by supporting institutions that satisfy the difference principle but directly in their own everyday conduct, such as their choice among employment options, as well.

This argument has already been discussed extensively in the literature, and I won't here add to this debate except to try to clarify the positions at issue.[1] For while Rawls focuses on developing principles for the evaluation of the basic structure -- what he calls "social justice" -- he points out that we can also evaluate the justice of other kinds of objects. However, "There is no reason to suppose ahead of time that the principles satisfactory for the basic structure hold for all cases . . . [such as] the various informal conventions and customs of everyday life" (TJ 7). Since Rawls does not elaborate these additional standards of "local justice" it is not at all obvious that he would say that it is perfectly just for individuals to take advantage of rare and valuable talents to gain additional income. This depends on the principles that it is appropriate to use when evaluating individual conduct, and Rawls's position is only that we should not assume that they are the same as those that are appropriate for evaluating the basic structure. Cohen gives some examples of injustice that he believes would escape an exclusive focus on the basic structure. There is room to dispute the details of his examples, but the general point is correct -- a just basic structure will not eliminate all injustice. The question, though, is whether injustice in the basic structure and other injustices have the same character and should be evaluated according to the same principles.

Cohen holds that the same principles should apply both to institutions and to individual conduct. This is because distributive justice is concerned withthe pattern of benefits and burdens in society . . . My concern is distributive justice, by which I uneccentrically mean justice (and its lack) in the distribution of benefits and burdens to individuals. My root belief is that there is injustice in distribution when inequality of goods reflects not such things as differences in the arduousness of different people's labors, or people's different preferences and choices with respect to income and leisure, but myriad forms of lucky and unlucky circumstances. (RJE 126; cf. 7)
Distributive justice is a matter of bringing about this correct pattern, and therefore anything that can causally effect the distribution of benefits and burdens can be assessed in terms of its contribution to this ideal: "there is no good reason why the very principles that govern the basic structure should not extend to individual choice within that structure" (RJE 359).

In addition to criticizing Rawls's restricted use of the difference principle, Cohen now holds that the difference principle is itself defective as a principle of justice. Following Brian Barry, Cohen reconstructs Rawls's argument for the difference principle in two stages. At the first stage, we arrive at an equal distribution because justice requires the elimination of "all morally arbitrary causes of inequality" and "there exist no causes of inequality that are not arbitrary in the specified sense" (RJE 89). At the second stage, we arrive at the difference principle by allowing those inequalities that work to everyone's advantage -- that is, those that are Pareto improvements over equality.[2] The problem, Cohen argues, is that the second stage introduces a consideration extraneous to justice itself. If you accept the first stage, then introducing an inequality based on morally arbitrary factors is unjust, even if it results in a Pareto improvement. Hence, Cohen holds that "distributive justice is (some kind of) equality"[3] (RJE 30 n.7). This apparently includes "leveling down" when that is the only way that equality can be achieved (RJE 317-318). However, Cohen also believes that there are often good reasons to accept Pareto improvements and the difference principle even at the cost of justice -- they "often trump justice" (RJE 30 n.7). Thus, the difference principle is not a principle of justice since it incorporates considerations extraneous to justice itself. Yet, for that very reason, it is often an appropriate rule of social regulation with which to assess institutional arrangements.

Although common, I believe this reconstruction of Rawls's position is mistaken. He does not believe that justice is a matter of eliminating the influence of luck. Despite the fact that the natural talents with which we are born are a matter of brute luck if anything is, Rawls holds that "The natural distribution [of talents] is neither just nor unjust" (TJ 87). Further, he explicitly rejects the principle of redress, which holds that "undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for" (TJ 86). In fact, if, as Cohen has it, the question concerns the just pattern of benefits and burdens to individuals, Rawls, perhaps eccentrically, believes that there is no general answer. Once an equal scheme of basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity have been secured, individual entitlements to particular shares of goods is a matter of pure procedural justice: "A distribution cannot be judged in isolation from the system of which it is the outcome or from what individuals have done in good faith in the light of established expectations" (TJ 76). The problem of social justice, for Rawls, concerns how a society should design the institutions within which its members interact to produce various outcomes. The institutional arrangement, not the resulting distribution, is fundamental for Rawls.

In the second part of RJE, Cohen presents a meta-ethical argument that fundamental normative principles cannot be justified (even in part) by non-normative facts. If there is a principle that we believe is only justified when certain factual conditions obtain, there must be a further principle that explains why the first principle is justified under those conditions. This further principle cannot itself be justified by those conditions. By repeatedly asking for and obtaining an explanation for why some condition is part of the justification of a principle, Cohen argues, we will eventually obtain a fact-free principle.

Cohen is not making the merely theoretical point that in some sense a full understanding of a principle requires knowledge of what (if anything) it would require in every possible world. He thinks that philosophers should be especially concerned to identify these fundamental principles, complaining that there has been "insufficient effort to identify" fact-free principles and that "the question for political philosophy is not what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference" (RJE 269, 268). It is unclear how exactly
Cohen thinks we are to identify these fundamental principles. This is especially problematic since he holds that "we determine the principles that we are willing to endorse through an investigation of our individual normative judgments on particular cases" and he is skeptical that philosophy can move us far from our "pertinent prephilosophical judgment" (RJE 4, 3). These particular judgments are typically heavily fact-dependent. As Cohen acknowledges, "It is, for example, bewildering to try to say what principles we would affirm for beings who were otherwise like us as we are in our adult state but whose normal life spans occupied only twenty-four hours" (RJE 246). Indeed it is bewildering, as is the attempt to identify principles for beings "with a life plan that is internally fully provided from its inception with everything that it requires for whatever life plan it might choose" (RJE 293).[4] Although learning what justice would require for such beings might count as knowledge, one might think that we have far greater prospects for increasing our knowledge about justice for human beings in more familiar circumstances (not to mention the greater practical interest of such questions). It is significant, I think, that to the extent that Cohen does attempt to justify his egalitarian conception of justice in the first part of the book, he does so through what he presents as an immanent critique of Rawls, helping himself to an egalitarian starting point.

The case for identifying fundamental principles would be strong if they were necessary in order to understand not only what was required in possible worlds very different from ours but also fully to understand what was required in ours and why. Cohen suggests this when he writes: "Until we unearth the fact-free principle that governs our fact-loaded particular judgments about justice, we don't know why we think what we think just is just" (RJE 291, cf. 246). Both Thomas Pogge and Samuel Freeman have pointed out that Cohen's formal argument will count as fundamental a conditional principle (roughly) of the form: "If factual condition C, then principle P."[5] That conditional principle itself does not assume C, nor is it justified by C. Cohen apparently accepts this point when he claims that the following "putative principle of justice is, in my view, fact-insensitive": "against a background of equality of access to advantage, people should internalize the costs their lack of care imposes upon others" (RJE 313). This fact-insensitive principle has as factual antecedent that the appropriate background is in place. It says nothing when those facts don't obtain, yet still counts as fundamental.

Cohen might argue that we don't fully understand a concept such as justice until we know what (if anything) it requires in all possible worlds. So conditional principles, even if technically fundamental, are not enough. If all we know about justice is that it requires P when C obtains, what about when C does not? Perhaps we should also endorse: "If not-C, then principle Q." There is an obvious sense in which the conjunction of these two conditionals gives us a more complete understanding of justice than one alone. On the other hand, while learning what justice requires when C does not obtain increases the breadth of our knowledge, it does not necessarily increase its depth. Unless there is a unified, unconditional fundamental principle, we may not know any more about why principle P holds in condition C than we did before. Sometimes Cohen does seem to assume that a more fundamental principle always gives us a greater depth of understanding. Quoting Nozick approvingly, he says that "A rule of regulation is 'a device for having certain effects'" (RJE 265). A clearer understanding of the end(s) served by a rule of regulation would count as a deeper understanding of the rule. Nevertheless there may be conditional principles that are not merely rules of regulation in this sense. They assert a principle under certain factual conditions, but not as a way to bring about some further effect. In addition, although Cohen thinks of a basic structure that satisfies the difference principle as an instrument for bringing about an equal distribution, that is not how Rawls thinks of it. It is, rather, what is required for individuals to respect one another as free and equal moral persons when certain factual conditions hold.

I conclude by noting that RJE is surprisingly apolitical in two senses. First, there is very little discussion of the concept of justice beyond its distributive aspects. There is, for example, virtually no discussion of political justice. In fact, Cohen seems to endorse the Marxist idea that the state is "an alien superstructural power" and if the right principles "are practiced in everyday life . . . then the state can wither away" (RJE 1). This, however, would only be possible if we could look forward to the elimination of deep disagreements about comprehensive doctrines and the value of various ends. If, as Rawls holds, diversity is the "the inevitable long-run result of the powers of human reason at work within the background of enduring free institutions,"[6] then we will continue to need institutional arrangements to resolve the inevitable conflicts among reasonable citizens. Indeed, if we simply assume that a scheme of personal property will have to be administered in some way -- including the resolution of reasonable disagreements about how general rules are to be applied to particular cases -- then we will need some kind of authoritative institutional arrangements. Further, in order to see those institutions as anything but alien impositions, we will need to regulate them through a democratic political mechanism.

For Cohen, distributive justice aims to overcome inequalities resulting from the "myriad forms of lucky and unlucky circumstances" (RJE 126). The institutions and relationships that individuals find themselves in are relevant to this goal only instrumentally. For Rawls, in contrast, the basic liberties (including the political liberties) and the principles of distributive justice are both part of a unified attempt to answer the question: "what is the most acceptable political conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal and as both reasonable and rational?"[7] The principles of social justice, which include the difference principle, apply in virtue of individuals being part of a shared political society. Different principles apply when there are different relations and there is no reason to assume that these relationships figure in an account of justice only instrumentally, as devices for achieving certain ends, such as a pattern of distribution, that can be independently identified.

Finally, there is very little discussion of Rawls's technical ideas of a "political conception of justice" and of "public reason" in RJE. Once the question is asked, however, it is clear that Cohen's account is not a political conception since he aims to apply it beyond the institutions of the basic structure. This is not, in itself, an objection. In developing a political conception of justice, Rawls does not call for an end to the investigation and defense of particular comprehensive doctrines. Nevertheless it is important to recognize the very different questions that Cohen and Rawls are asking. Once these differences are recognized, what is most striking is perhaps the high degree to which, when limited to the question of institutional design, Cohen's account and justice as fairness overlap.[8]

[1] See, for example, Kenneth Baynes, "Ethos and Institutions: On the Site of Distributive Justice," Journal of Social Philosophy, 37 (2006); Joshua Cohen, "Taking People as They Are?" Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30 (2001); Samuel Freeman, "Rawls and Luck Egalitarianism" in Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2007); Jon Mandle, "Distributive Justice at Home and Abroad" in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, Thomas Christiano and John Christman, eds. (Blackwell, 2009); Thomas Pogge, "On the Site of Distributive Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Murphy," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29 (2000); Samuel Scheffler, "What Is Egalitarianism?" Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31 (2003); Samuel Scheffler, "Is the Basic Structure Basic?" in The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen, Christine Sypnowich, ed. (Oxford, 2006); Paul Smith, "Incentives and Justice: G.A. Cohen's Egalitarian Critique of Rawls," Social Theory and Practice, 24 (1998); Andrew Williams, "Incentives, Inequality, and Publicity," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27 (1998); Jonathan Wolff, "Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27 (1998).

[2] Cohen is insufficiently attentive to the fact that there are many distributions that are Pareto improvements over an equal distribution that the difference principle would not allow because they do not maximally benefit the least advantaged. This point holds even when the difference principle is understood as giving permission for (rather than requiring) certain inequalities.

[3] Cohen is vague on the "equality of what?" question. He apparently continues to hold some version of the "equality of opportunity for advantage" view that he first articulated in "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99 (1989). This is not discussed beyond his pointing out that equality of income is insufficient: "where work is specially arduous or stressful, higher remuneration is a counterbalancing equalizer on a sensible view of how to judge whether or not things are equal" (RJE 56). It is not clear to me whether he intends to single out arduousness and stress (and perhaps other objective factors) or whether these are meant to indicate subjective dispreference. Either option raises a host of questions that I cannot discuss here.

[4] Pogge points out that "Other worlds can be very different from ours: There may not be sufficiently separable individuals. Life-spans may be dramatically unequal. And conceptions of the good may be so radically diverse that it seems ludicrous to affirm what Cohen's egalitarianism requires: that the relational predicate 'is better off than' can meaningfully be applied to each and every pair of individuals" (Thomas Pogge, "Cohen to the Rescue!" Ratio 21 (2008), p.462 n.8.).

[5] See Pogge, "Cohen to the Rescue!"; Samuel Freeman, "Constructivism, Facts, and Moral Justification" in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, Thomas Christiano and John Christman, eds. (Blackwell, 2009).

[6] John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (Columbia, 2005), p.4.

[7] John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Erin Kelly, ed. (Harvard, 2001), pp.7-8.

[8] Thanks to Chris Bertram, Sam Freeman, Lisa Fuller, Arthur Ripstein, and Andrew Williams.

*Originally published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16945

Brighouse and Robeyns: Measuring Justice

Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, Ed. Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns, Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2010, 268 pp.

The Metric Justice

Over the last decades, political theorists and philosophers have at length debated the question what the proper metric of justice is. In other words, they have sought to answer the question “what should we look at, when evaluating whether one state of affairs is more or less just than another?” Should we evaluate the distribution of happiness? Or wealth? Or life chances? Or some combination of these and other factors? The Rawlsian social primary goods approach and the capability approach are two prominent answers to this question. The aim of this volume is to present a systematic study of these two approaches to measuring justice.

Building on the work of John Rawls, some theorists use the social primary goods approach. Social primary goods are, according to Rawls, those goods that anyone would want regardless of whatever else they wanted. They are means, or resources (broadly conceived), and this approach says that we should compare holdings of such resources, without looking closely at what individuals, possessed of heterogeneous abilities and preferences, can do with them. Rawls specifies the social
primary goods in a list as follows:

i) The basic liberties (freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, etc.) are the background institutions necessary for the development and exercise of the capacity to decide upon and revise, and rationally to pursue, a conception of the good. Similarly, these liberties allow for the development and exercise of the sense of right and justice under political and social conditions that are free.
ii) Freedom of movement and free choice of occupation against a background of diverse opportunities are required for the pursuit of final ends as well as to give effect to a decision to revise and change them, if one so desires.
iii) Powers and prerogatives of offices of responsibility are needed to give scope to various self-governing and social capacities of the self.
iv) Income and wealth, understood broadly as they must be, are all-purpose means (having an exchange value) for achieving directly or indirectly a wide range of ends, whatever they happen to be.
v) The social basis of self-respect are those aspects of basic institutions that are normally essential if citizens are to have a lively sense of their own worth as moral persons and to be able to realise their highest order interests and advance their ends with self confidence.
The other approach, developed most prominently by Amartya Sen, and more recently also by Martha Nussbaum, is known as the capability approach. Instead of looking at people’s holdings of, or prospects for holding, external goods, we look at what kinds of functionings they are able to achieve. As Sen puts it, in a good theory of well-being, “account would have to be taken not only of the primary goods the persons respectively hold, but also of the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversion of primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends. What matters to people is that they are able to achieve actual functionings, that is the actual living that people manage to achieve”. Walking is a functioning, so are eating, reading, mountain climbing, and chatting. The concept of functionings “reflects the various things a person may value doing or being, varying from the basic (being adequately nourished) to the very complex (being able to take part in the life of the community)”. Yet when we make interpersonal comparisons of well-being we should find a measure which incorporates references to functionings, but also reflects the intuition that what matters is not merely achieving the functioning but being free to achieve it. So we should look at “the freedom to achieve actual livings that one can have a reason to value” or, to put it another way, substantive freedoms – the capabilities to choose a life one has reason to value.

The capabilities approach has been operationalized both by the UN and a number of local and national governments, and seems to have been the more prominent of the theories among policymakers and economists. The social primary goods approach has, perhaps, been more widely accepted among philosophers. Both are regarded as among the most important contemporary theories, and are part of the standard curriculum of students in philosophy, politics, economics, and other social sciences. But a systematic comparison of social primary goods and capabilities as the metric of justice has hitherto been missing from the literature. The aim of this volume is to fill that gap by providing a comprehensive study of both approaches, by confronting the views of a range of theorists – some more sympathetic to the primary goods metric, some more sympathetic to the capability approach.

Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns, Editors

Richard J. Arneson: Justice is not Equality

'Justice is not Equality' de Richard Arneson, profesor de UCSD, es uno de los ensayos críticos reunidos en el libro Justice, Equality and Constructivism: Essays on G. A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality, Brian Feltham (editor), Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, 2009, 136 pp. Ya desde el título, el ensayo de Arneson es muy provocativo, pero al final de su análisis sólo quedan discutibles escombros.


Rescuing Justice and Equality is an original, subtle, and astute work of ethical and political philosophy. From its justly renowned author, G. A. Cohen, we have come to expect no less. The work ranges over questions of ethical theory (metaethics) and normative political theory. My remarks address only the latter.

Cohen’s book tries to develop both a sustained critique of some ideas on justice that had been affirmed by John Rawls and a meditation on the ideal of socialism. This dual aim does not as one might fear force a split personality on the enterprise, which in fact shows a unified theme. Cohen interprets John Rawls as the quintessential liberal, urging that egalitarian justice can in principle be fully attained in a market economy setting. More important to Cohen is the way he sees Rawls distinguishing between public and private life in the just society. For Rawls, justice is a norm that mainly regulates the structure of major institutions—the basic structure of society. Individuals are bound by justice mainly to support just institutions when they exist or help bring them about when they do not, and to obey laws compatible with justice. Within just institutions, individuals are morally free to carry out their own projects and aims. This picture of the just society conjures up for Cohen the image of an economy in which selfish individuals try to do as well for themselves as they can within the just institutional rules. The image is defective, says Cohen, and the defect precludes our calling a society that fits the image a just society.

According to Cohen, the distributive justice component of social justice requires that the distribution of benefits and burdens across individual persons is fair, and bringing about and sustaining the just distribution are the responsibilities of the individual members of society not merely the standard for choice of basic structural institutions. In Cohen’s idea of a just society individuals make their choices in daily life, within the limits of an appropriate personal prerogative that each of us has to pursue her own projects and aims, with a view to contributing to the good of others and to bringing about a just distribution, which Cohen supposes to be roughly an equal distribution. The shape and structure of institutions must also satisfy principles of justice, but that’s not enough. In this connection Cohen makes an apt comparison between the just society and the society that overcomes racism. To qualify as non-racist, it is not enough that a society’s institutional rules should prevent people from acting on racial prejudice when they interact within basic institutions.

Continúa aquí

'Justice' with Michael Sandel

A los políticos se les llena la boca al pronunciar ideas como justicia social, democracia, libertad, igualdad, comunidad. ¿Pero sabrán verdaderamente lo qué significan estas ideas? ¿Cómo justifican los políticos los valores concernientes a la vida en sociedad sometida a un sistema de poder? Frente a estas preguntas los políticos seguramente han de lamentar no haber estudiado filosofía política.
Justice es un curso de introducción a la filosofía política impartido por el profesor Michael Sandel en la Universidad de Harvard. La asociación del WGHB Boston, el prestigiado canal de la televisión pública americana, y la Universidad de Harvard ha producido esta extraordinaria serie de televisión de 12 capítulos o videos, que nos ofrece la oportunidad de alcanzar una mayor claridad y comprensión de los debates contemporáneos en la esfera de los valores morales.
Se trata de una empresa de educación a distancia donde los políticos y los estudiantes de primer año en la universidad podrán comprender de una manera amena y clara, pero sin menoscabo del rigor, los difíciles problemas morales actuales y, al tiempo, cuestionar sus propias creencias a la luz de nuevos puntos de vista. Sandel reflexiona sobre la idea de la justicia desde las ópticas del utilitarismo, el liberalismo y el comunitarismo, así como revisa los temas urgentes de hoy en día: matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo, aborto, legalización de las drogas, prostitución, terrorismo, manipulación genética, impuestos, etc.



Por último, se ha publicado, en paralelo a la producción del curso para televisión, el libro de Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009). Vale la pena seguir a Sandel en estas reflexiones.
Ver Justice con Michael Sandel aquí

Rescatar la justicia y la igualdad: Homenaje a G.A. Cohen

Los días 23 y 24 de Enero de 2009, el Centro de Estudios sobre Justicia Social de la Universidad de Oxford organizó un ciclo de conferencias en homenaje a Gerald A. Cohen, quien después de 23 años de ocupar la cátedra Chichele de Teoría Social y Política se jubila de sus labores académicas. Escuchar los podcasts aquí

G.A. Cohen: Rescatar la justicia y la igualdad (de los rawlsianos)

G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008, 448 pp.


En este estimulante trabajo de filosofía política, Gerald A. Cohen se propone rescatar la tesis igualitaria que postula que donde se ejerce la justicia distributiva, las condiciones materiales de los individuos son altamente igualitarias. Cohen al cuestionar la versión rawlsiana de una sociedad justa demuestra que la justicia distributiva no tolera grandes desigualdades.

En el curso de una profunda y sofisticada crítica de la teoría de la justicia de Rawls, Cohen demuestra que las cuestiones sobre justicia distributiva no sólo conciernen al estado, sino también a los individuos en su vida cotidiana. En una escala macro, las normas de las instituciones y políticas públicas también se aplican, en una escala micro y con las adecuaciones pertinentes, a las acciones y decisiones de los individuos.

Cohen critica también el constructivismo de Rawls al fundir el concepto de la justicia con otros conceptos. En el centro de la arquitectónica rawlsiana, la idea de la justicia no se distingue de otros bienes o valores de la normatividad social. La superación de esas amalgamas acercaría la justicia a la igualdad.

Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp.


[The powerful tradition of the Enlightenment saw clear-headed reasoning as a primal resource of making societies decent and acceptable.]

[However, t]he leaders of thought in the Enlightenment did not [...] speak with one voice. In fact, there is a substantial dichotomy between two different lines of reasoning about justice that can be seen among two groups of leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the Enlightenment period. One approach concentrated on identifying perfectly just social arrangements, and took the characterisation of "just institutions" to be the principal – and often the only identified – task of the theory of justice.
Woven in different ways around the idea of a hypothetical "social contract", major contributions were made in this line of thinking by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and later by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, among others. The contractarian approach has become the dominant influence in contemporary political philosophy, led by the most prominent political philosopher of our time, John Rawls – whose classic book of 1971, A Theory of Justice, presents a definitive statement on the social contract approach to justice. The principal theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy draw in one way or another on the social contract approach, and concentrate on the search for ideal social institutions.

In contrast, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for example) took a variety of approaches that shared an interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people's actual behaviour, their social interactions, and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens. The analytical, and rather mathematical, discipline of "social choice theory" – which can be traced to the works of Condorcet in the 18th century, but has been developed in the present form under the leadership of Kenneth Arrow in the last century – belongs to this second line of investigation. That approach, suitably adapted, can make a substantial contribution, I believe, to addressing questions about the enhancement of justice and the removal of injustice in the world.

In this alternative approach, we don't begin by asking what a perfectly just society would look like, but asking what remediable injustices could be seen on the removal of which there would be a reasoned agreement. "In the little world in which children have their existence," says Pip in Great Expectations, "there is nothing so finely perceived, and finely felt, as injustice." In fact, the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well. What moves us is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.

This is evident enough in our day-to-day life, with inequities or subjugations from which we may suffer and which we have good reason to resent; but it also applies to more widespread diagnoses of injustice in the wider world in which we live. One of the limitations of the social contract approach to justice, which is so pervasive in contemporary political philosophy, is the unjustified conviction that there could only be one precise combination of principles that could serve as the basis of ideal social institutions. In contrast with this rigid insistence, a social choice approach allows the possibility of a plurality of competing principles, each of which is given a status, after being subjected to critical scrutiny.

Thanks to this plurality, we may not be able to resolve on grounds of justice alone all the questions that may be asked: for example, whether a 40% top tax rate is more just – or less just – than a 41% top rate. And yet we have every reason to try to see whether we can get reasoned agreement on removing what can be identified as clear injustice in the world, such as slavery, or the subjugation of women, or extreme exploitation of vulnerable labour (which so engaged Adam Smith, Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft, and later Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill), or gross medical neglect of the bulk of the world population today (through the absence of medical facilities in parts of Africa or Asia, or a lack of universal health coverage in most countries in the world, including the US), or the prevalence of torture (which continues to be used with remarkable frequency in the contemporary world – sometimes practised by pillars of the global establishment), or the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (for example in India, despite the successful abolition of famines).

The idea of justice demands comparisons of actual lives that people can lead, rather than a remote search for ideal institutions. That is what makes the idea of justice relevant as well as exciting in practical reasoning.

Tomado de The Guardian, 13 de Julio de 2009

Nancy Fraser: Global Justice and the Renewal of Critical Theory

Nancy Fraser explica cómo el cambio de la demanda por una redistribución económica a la lucha por el reconocimiento asumido por los movimientos políticos durante los noventas forma parte de la 'condición post-socialista'. La caída de la Unión Soviética, afirma Fraser, no sólo acarreó el fin del socialismo real, sino también agotó la energía de la mayor parte de los movimientos con aspiraciones sociales igualitarias. No obstante que vivimos un periodo de globalización, el cambio puede ser visto como un 'marco' de orientación. Los defensores del proyecto igualitario no estarán ya limitados por las fronteras de la nación-estado y podrán así concentrar sus esfuerzos en las desigualdades entre las naciones antes que al interior de éstas. En el activismo transnacional Fraser pone sus esperanzas en el surgimiento de una conciencia 'post-socialista'. Ver aquí

'Los retos de la sociedad por venir' de Luis Villoro

En Los retos de la sociedad por venir (México, FCE, 2007, 226 pp.), Luis Villoro reúne varios ensayos escritos a lo largo de los últimos años. Parte de una reflexión sistemática, el libro se sitúa en el proyecto de reforma del pensamiento político moderno que ha venido ocupando a Villoro por más de dos décadas y del que es pieza esencial El poder y el valor (1997). Este texto pretende contribuir a descubrir los espectros de la razón “ilustrada”; espectros empeñados en proyectar la ilusión de la modernidad occidental sobre las sociedades periféricas, atrasadas social y políticamente, sin otras condiciones específicas.

Los retos cruciales que enfrenta “la sociedad por venir” son: justicia, democracia y multiculturalismo; retos a los que Villoro intenta proponer respuestas “razonables”, esto es, respuestas fundadas en razones suficientes: pensar la justicia no como derecho universal, sino como ejercicio de la no-exclusión; reformular la democracia representativa para dar lugar a una democracia participativa, comunitaria o consensual, y finalmente, criticar la pretensión universalista de la cultura occidental, así como las posiciones que plantean un relativismo cultural absoluto, postulando condiciones que permitan un diálogo intercultural.

Mas la originalidad de Los retos de la sociedad por venir reside en “la vía negativa hacia la justicia”, esto es, Villoro aborda el tema de la justicia desde el análisis filosófico de la experiencia de la injusticia; injusticia entendida como exclusión. Esta vía conceptual en negativo, que se sitúa en el centro de la propuesta, no sólo responde a una estrategia intelectual original, sino al reconocimiento de una realidad concreta: la experiencia cotidiana de la injusticia, aunque no por ello menos indignante y opresiva, en los países del segundo mundo. Propuesta que hace posible una reconsideración crítica y radical, desde una política de emancipación, de las premisas de los modelos teóricos sobre la justicia.

Las teorías de la justicia contemporáneas suelen compartir un punto de vista: el de sociedades desarrolladas que han superado ya umbrales insoportables de injusticia económica y social, y han establecido al tiempo regímenes políticos basados en procedimientos consensuales que regulan los acuerdos entre los ciudadanos con derechos iguales. De ahí que las teorías filosóficas para fundamentar la justicia suelen partir de la idea de un consenso racional entre sujetos libres e iguales inscritos en una democracia bien ordenada.

Pero, para bien o para mal, los filósofos políticos que reflexionan sobre los mismos problemas éticos en sociedades social y políticamente deprimidas, esto es, donde aún no se instaura sólidamente la democracia y los grupos mayoritarios viven en la desigualdad y la marginalidad, el punto de vista sobre la justicia, sostiene Villoro, no puede ser el mismo. Por eso, el punto de partida de la reflexión ético-política de nuestro autor no es alguna forma de consenso, fáctico o hipotético, sino la percepción originaria de la injusticia real, esto es, la ausencia de condiciones (alimentación, vivienda, salud, instrucción y pertenencia a una comunidad) para la realización de la idea de justicia. La alternativa que Villoro explora se orientaría en dar razón de la idea de justicia por la voluntad de disrupción de una situación percibida como injusta, sea ésta o no objeto de consenso. Así, la teoría de la justicia “en negativo” se remitiría a esa experiencia de hecho, partiría de su examen crítico y determinaría los principios de la justicia desde su ausencia o inoperancia en la sociedad real.
Villoro parte de la experiencia de una realidad: “la vivencia del sufrimiento causado por la injusticia”. La experiencia de la injusticia expresa una vivencia originaria: la vivencia de un mal, un daño, sufrido en nuestra relación con los otros que no tiene justificación. El mal injustificado causado por los otros es el efecto de una situación de poder. ¿Implica la justicia, se pregunta Villoro, escapar del poder?

Con Hobbes, sabemos cuál es el principio originario de todas las acciones humanas: el deseo de poder. Pero frente al afán universal de poder, dice Villoro, hay una alternativa: “la búsqueda del no-poder”. Escapar del poder equivale a liberarse de toda voluntad de poder, esto es, asumir una actitud que rechace y resista al poder. Entonces al poder habría que oponerle un contrapoder que el autor enuncia como toda fuerza de resistencia frente a la dominación. La diversidad de la resistencia al poder (sujetos, formas, grados) podría al tiempo conjugarse bajo un mismo concepto en la persecución de un fin común: la abolición de la dominación. Elegir así la posibilidad de actuar para escapar del poder injusto es el punto de partida de una “vía negativa frente al poder”. Villoro ha puesto a Hobbes de cabeza.

Tres momentos tendría, siguiendo a Villoro, esta vía negativa contra el poder injustificado; momentos que no corresponden necesariamente a etapas sucesivas, sino a estados de complejidad que se yuxtaponen y coinciden en el proceso de alcanzar una concepción más racional de la justicia a partir de su ausencia. En una situación de injusticia, la experiencia de la exclusión marcaría el primer momento en la vía contra el poder, cuya raíz está en la toma de conciencia de una carencia causada por un daño producido por acciones u omisiones de los otros. El segundo momento sería la equiparación con el excluyente que se caracteriza por el paso de sufrir la experiencia de la exclusión a disentir del rechazo de nuestro propio valor desde el poder. Se inicia así un movimiento de rebeldía ante la injusticia que se expresaría en la apreciación del excluido por sí mismo frente al otro que lo rechaza y, en paralelo, la actualización de la conciencia de igualdad entre ambos. Finalmente, a la equiparación con el otro se da el tercer paso de este proceso: el reconocimiento del sujeto hacia una ética concreta. Desde el momento que el excluido demanda el reconocimiento de la igualdad con el otro, el sujeto reivindica un derecho que conlleva la eliminación de una situación de exclusión vivida. Así, el reclamo del excluido parte de una valoración originaria que puede abrir la posibilidad de reivindicar un valor común universalizable: el valor de la no-exclusión.

A continuación, Villoro se ocupa del análisis de los principales modelos teóricos sobre la justicia: el teleológico, que parte de Aristóteles, y el deontológico, cultivado en años recientes por John Rawls. Análisis a partir del cual intenta dar a luz las intuiciones básicas de una teoría “negativa” de la justicia que se remitiría a la percepción de una situación de exclusión real con sus determinaciones concretas. La estrategia teórica del autor consiste en hacer una radiografía general de ambos modelos, sin considerar sus distintas versiones, de modo de dejar ver sus rasgos estructurales. Así, el análisis de los elementos del modelo teleológico da lugar a cuatro dificultades que nuestro autor señala.

1. La posibilidad de exclusión. El primer rasgo destaca que la justicia es proporcional al valor (mérito) de las personas en la particular situación social que cada cual ocupa.

Si la justicia se adecua al valor de cada quien, no establece entre todos una igualdad de bienes. Si es proporcional a las características de cada persona en su situación, podría justificar privilegios y ventajas de unos sobre otros. Las diferencias que acepta podrían no reducirse a la contribución de cada quien al bien común, sino a la situación de poder en la sociedad (p. 61).

¿No será, se pregunta Villoro, esa posición inherente al modelo teórico mismo? ¿No consagra de hecho las desigualdades existentes? ¿No excluye a una parte de los miembros de la sociedad?

2. La relatividad histórica de las normas. Percibimos la justicia como una relación entre personas situadas en sociedad; relación fundada en normas que derivan a su vez de nuestra idea del bien común. Pero la concepción del bien difiere de acuerdo con las culturas, las épocas, los regímenes políticos e incluso las distintas concepciones morales y religiosas. Si la naturaleza de las normas dependiera de las diferentes concepciones del bien común, entonces aquéllas serían relativas a cada forma de sociedad. Aquí surge la segunda dificultad teórica.

Si las características de la justicia dependen de la concepción del valor de cada sociedad, si tienen por fin la realización de la vida buena y ésta se logra con la práctica personal de la virtud, el fundamento de la justicia es un fundamento empírico, variable en cada caso. Si la justicia cambia con las leyes de la ciudad, su fundamento sería la convención. Si [...] se funda en un orden natural universal, su validez depende de una hipótesis discutible por incomprobable. Las normas de justicia deben de ser universales, si no hay una ley natural o divina, ¿en qué fundan su universalidad? (p. 63).

3. La opresión del individuo por la comunidad. El tercer rasgo concierne a la relación del individuo con la sociedad: la sociedad precede al individuo. Por un parte, la sociedad es el espacio ya constituido de relaciones humanas donde la libertad del individuo se realiza; y por la otra, donde la justicia es el vínculo de todos los hombres en la participación de un fin común, de modo que el bien de cada cual no es ajeno al bien de la sociedad a la que pertenece. Pero esta idea de precedencia de la sociedad suscita preguntas.

La precedencia del bien de la sociedad sobre la vida buena individual, ¿no corre el riesgo de limitar, aún más, de oprimir al individuo por mor de la comunidad? En lugar de que la libertad de la persona se despliegue sobre el previo ámbito de la sociedad, ¿no sería más correcto pensar que la sociedad se constituye por obra de la libertad de las personas en sociedad? (ibidem).

4. La pluralidad del bien frente a la universalidad del deber. El último rasgo de la justicia indica para todos lo que debe hacerse en las relaciones con los demás en sociedad. Este modelo funda lo debido en el bien propio de cada hombre. El bien del individuo está ordenado al bien común. Así, del bien común se derivan los deberes en sociedad. Pero Villoro cuestiona.

¿Y si no hubiera una concepción del bien común sino varias? […] Los principios de justicia no podrían entonces depender de una concepción del bien, sino de principios que condicionaran cualquier concepción del bien (p. 64).

Por otra parte, en el pensamiento moderno ha prevalecido paralelamente al modelo teleológico un modelo alternativo: el deontológico. Hoy en día, entre sus diversas versiones, destaca la teoría de la justicia de Rawls. Su punto de partida es descubrir “las reglas generales que a todos obligan por igual”. Lo justo como un orden normativo que establece una equidad conforme a razón.
Al igual que en el modelo anterior, Villoro radiografía los rasgos principales de este modelo normativo de justicia que podrían resumirse en los puntos siguientes:

1. La justicia es inherente a la sociedad y a sus instituciones, antes que a los individuos. La idea de la justicia está reservada a instancias externas, ajenas, a las condiciones cotidianas reales de los individuos.

2. El orden de la justicia se expresa en principios generales que valen para todos por igual. Este modelo funda la igualdad y la libertad de toda persona en el carácter universal de las normas; elimina toda exclusión al aplicar leyes generales. Sin embargo, Villoro cuestiona:

¿No se trata de una libertad y una igualdad abstractas que no se concretan en ninguna sociedad real? ¿No se traducen, en las sociedades reales, en una injusticia efectiva de la que los excluidos no pueden 'escapar'? (p. 82).

3. Su fundamento es un convenio hipotético entre sujetos racionales, libres e iguales. En Rawls, el convenio reviste la forma del contractualismo.

4. El convenio originario es un consenso moral, no puramente instrumental, que obedece no sólo a un interés personal de las partes, sino también a un punto de vista universalizable. En Rawls, el convenio universalizable se logra, en la "posición original", por el recurso a una condición: los sujetos están cubiertos por un "velo de ignoracia". Nadie sabe cuál es su lugar en la sociedad, su posición de clase ni su suerte en la distribución de ventajas y capacidades naturales, ni tampoco sabe acerca de una concepción del bien. La función del “velo” es eliminar cualquier interés que excluya el interés de los demás. Pero Villoro advierte:

En la posición original se logra la construcción de un consenso moral, por la generalización de los sujetos que intervienen en él. Pero la generalización se obtiene a un costo: la abstracción de los sujetos reales (p. 70).

5. El concepto de la persona moral la determina por su capacidad de seguir con autonomía las normas debidas. Este modelo establece como principio inviolable la libertad individual y considera que la sociedad bien ordenada debe ser construida por los sujetos autónomos. “¿Pero puede ser el principio de libertad la única base ética de una sociedad bien ordenada?” (p. 82).

6. Las características de la justicia no derivan de una concepción del bien común, sino de “lo debido” para toda concepción del bien. Rawls se adecua a la pluralidad de concepciones del bien, que subsisten y se oponen en las sociedades actuales, al subrayar la idea de la justicia en un orden de la razón, neutral, que distingue entre “lo debido” y “lo bueno”. “Pero, ante el pluralismo del bien, ¿podría expresarse la justicia en un concepto general, unívoco, acerca de un deber equivalente para todos, en todo tiempo?” (loc. cit.).

Las dificultades que enfrentan los dos modelos teóricos sobre la justicia, así como las antinomias que se producen de la oposición permanente entre ambos (del sujeto, del orden normativo, de la asociación y del deber y el fin), invitan a construir un modelo conceptual capaz de descubrir los supuestos que comparten y, concomitantemente, hacer compatibles sus discrepancias teóricas. En esta dirección, Villoro ya ha colocado una piedra angular: la vía negativa hacia la justicia.

Los retos de la sociedad por venir es una obra escrita con lucidez y pasión como ya nos tiene acostumbrados Villoro. No se trata de una obra inocua, sino expresión de una filosofía política comprometida y liberadora, profunda y rigurosa. Una filosofía política tan necesaria frente a la miseria de valores e ideales de nuestra política real.

Alfredo Lucero-Montaño