The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion
What
is economic justice?
The concept is clearly a central concern for those who believe that the
salvation and the righteousness of which the Bible speaks are social and not
merely individual. Nonetheless, the concepts of economic justice commonly
employed or assumed in theological essays and denominational statements do not
seem to have been thought through with any care. A critical reader might wonder
if those who use the phrase know themselves what they mean by it, and whether
they could really intend what they seem to be asserting.
Justice
is notoriously hard to define in any way that goes much beyond platitude and
still commands wide assent. That probably explains, at least in part, why most
people who use the term do so without defining it. They assume (or hope) that
others will understand the word as they do. But by excusing themselves from the
necessity of stating clearly what they mean, advocates of justice often fail to
discover that what they are proposing has no defensible meaning at all.
The
problem of talking clearly and sensibly about justice diminishes considerably,
however, when we shift our focus and talk about injustice. “Injustice
wears the trousers,” as J. R. Lucas has put it.
[I]t is when injustice
is in danger of being done that we become agitated. . . . And therefore we
should follow the example of Aristotle, and adopt a negative approach,
discovering what justice is by considering on what occasions we protest at
injustice or unfairness.
What, then, do writers
in the biblical tradition have in mind when they protest against economic
injustice?
They most commonly seem
to be pointing to an objectionable inequality of money incomes. Since no
one is willing to argue that all inequality is unjust, the question
immediately arises: When and why is inequality of income unjust? When the
question is seriously pursued, it proves extraordinarily difficult to answer
satisfactorily.
A
basic but generally neglected difficulty stems from the fact that inequality of
current money income is not a reliable indicator of inequality in the power to
acquire valued goods. There are many reasons for this. One important example is
provided by the case of Americans over sixty-five. While their money incomes
tend to be low, they often own capital goods (home, automobile, furniture, a
lifetime’s accumulation of household tools) and special entitlements (reduced
fares, tax exemptions, Medicare benefits) that make their money income a very
poor gauge of their real income.
The
situation of older persons raises the more general question of age. Since
earnings typically change with age, it will always be misleading to compare the
incomes of different groups without taking explicit account of their ages. The
average income of U.S. families in which the principal earner is 45 to 54 is
about twice the average of income of families in which the principal earner is
under 25.3 This is obviously an inequality, but it is not
an injustice. On the contrary, it would be unjust to allow a medical student to
qualify for welfare assistance, on the grounds of low current income, rather
than having to borrow against expected future income.
Family size and
composition also affect both money income and the welfare significance of that
income. Other things being equal, people’s incomes decline when they separate
or divorce, or when they choose to live alone rather than with relatives.
Inequalities resulting from such decisions are not injustices unless we believe
that people have a right to make these decisions without experiencing any
income change as a consequence.
People
make many other decisions that cause their incomes to differ in ways that few
who thought about it carefully would want to call unjust. Some families have a
single earner; others have two adult members pursuing careers. Some people work
a forty-hour week or less, while others seek overtime, moonlight, or take up a
trade or profession that enables or requires them to work twice as long and
hard as their neighbors work. Some devote their resources predominantly to
current consumption, while others opt more heavily for investment activities:
schooling, training, or the purchase of assets that will yield larger future
returns. Some simply manage their resources more carefully than others.
Everyone does not have an equal opportunity to make such choices, of course;
but it is surely not unjust to let these choices have some effect on people’s
incomes. A quite substantial inequality of money incomes would seem to be
compatible with even highly egalitarian concepts of economic justice.
But
why do we focus so exclusively on money incomes and the goods that money will
buy directly? Our society also displays a highly unequal distribution of power,
prestige, challenging and satisfying work opportunities, as well as risks and
uncertainties. At some level of income these other goods surely become more
important than money income. Are we preoccupied with money incomes because we
think we know how to redistribute them, whereas we don’t know how to
redistribute power, prestige, and “meaningful” work? Is this perhaps a form of
“commodity fetishism,” in which we transform the indexes of economic
calculation into measures of welfare and even worth? If so, this would be an
ironic ideological triumph of capitalism over its critics.
Those who infer economic
injustice from income inequality are rarely willing to tell us how much
inequality would be consistent with justice. “Less” is not an adequate answer.
Where is the limit? Many advocates of greater income equality have argued that
the maximum inequality compatible with justice is the minimum inequality that
will preserve incentives to work, risk, innovate, and perform competently and
conscientiously. It is not obvious why this should be so. But in many areas of
economic life, this limit has long since been passed. Incentives don’t simply
“disappear” at some point. They diminish, at different rates for different
people under different circumstances. More importantly, they change.
People alter their activities in response to high marginal tax rates;
they don’t simply retire.
The
best evidence that the incentive criterion is not in fact being used by
advocates of income redistribution is their widespread indifference to the
readily demonstrable effects of high marginal tax rates, explicit on high
incomes and implicit in current welfare programs. Imagine a situation in which
acceptance of an $8,000-per-year job entails a loss of $6,000 in cash and
in-kind transfers such as Medicaid benefits and food stamps, plus payment of
$2,000 in income and Social Security taxes and the acceptance of job-associated
costs. That amounts to a 100 percent marginal tax on earnings. The fact
that our income redistribution system has created marginal tax rates of this
magnitude and allowed them to persist is fairly good evidence that the
preservation of work incentives is not an important criterion for those
advocating further redistribution.
Equality (or less
inequality) in the distribution of income does not seem, then, to be a workable
criterion of economic justice. What about the criterion of need?
If
we define need in terms of what is required to sustain life on an adequate
level, we run into two problems. Most simply, the criterion of need is unrealistic
in poor economies and irrelevant, at least for most of those who talk about
economic justice, in affluent ones.
For
the vast majority of the people who have ever lived or are living now, poverty
is the consequence of low productivity, not of unequal distribution. No
redistribution of income within the country would satisfy the “needs” of all
the people currently living in Kampuchea, Bangladesh, or Ethiopia. There is
simply not enough to distribute.
At
the other end of the income scale, people who speak of “needs” in Canada,
Sweden, or the United States clearly do not have in mind anything even remotely
close to subsistence incomes. “Need” in these countries is culturally defined.
An American family today “needs,” if it is to maintain a decent, socially acceptable
level of living, enough income to secure housing, clothing, food, furniture,
recreation, and medical services in a quantity and of a quality that could
not have been provided to more than a small minority as recently as fifty
years ago. By today’s standards, then, a majority of Americans did not have
enough income to meet their “needs” at a time when our incomes were the highest
in the world and the object of widespread admiration and envy.
The
fact is that, in wealthy countries, “need” is continuously redefined to embrace
whatever becomes widely available as a result of increased production. “Need”
defined in absolute or physiological terms is accepted as a standard for
economic justice only with reference to very poor countries, where low productivity
makes the standard impossible to meet. In wealthy countries, “need” is
relative. But as soon as we allow “need” to be determined by prevailing
incomes, we have actually abandoned the criterion of need for the criterion of
equality. And we are back to the question, When does inequality become
injustice?
The
notion that “need” or subsistence is more a sociological than a biological fact
has a long and respectable lineage. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx
all defined subsistence at least partly in sociological terms; the propensity
to view poverty as a relative matter is therefore not simply the product of
some modern rage to reduce income inequalities. However, neither Smith,
Ricardo, nor Marx had any pressing reason to wonder about the ultimate implications
of defining poverty in terms of relative deprivation. If it is the
social significance of differences that matters, and if, as a great deal of
evidence strongly suggests, the elimination of some differences increases the
social significance of those that remain, then the pursuit of a just pattern of
income distribution based on need could be the costly pursuit of a mirage. It
might even be no more nor less than the sanctification of envy.
What about the criterion
of merit or desert? This criterion has always figured prominently in formal
discussions of justice. It is therefore somewhat surprising to discover how
rarely it is invoked in contemporary ecclesiastical statements on economic
justice. Is that because theology, or at least the kind of theology dominant in
contemporary economic discussions, has no place for the criterion of merit? If
all that we possess, including our intelligence, aptitudes, and attitudes, is
the gift of God, then claims or merit or special desert would indeed seem to be
ruled out.
I
believe that this is in fact the explanation for the puzzling absence of the
merit criterion from so many theological discussions of justice. But that
absence makes the discussions thoroughly unrealistic. All of us, including the
most egalitarian theological ethicist, do in fact regard merit as relevant to
the distribution of economic goods. We do not regard the parable of the
employer who gave the same wage to all his employees, regardless of how long
they had worked, as normative for the employment relationship. Those who have
borne the burden and heat of the day deserve more than those who started
work just before quitting time. The employer may, if he wishes, pay the late
arrivals as much as he is obligated to pay those who worked all day. But that
would be a matter of benevolence, not justice. And it would surely be unjust
for him to strike an average and pay five hours of wages to those who worked
eight hours and to those who worked but two. Those who worked eight hours have
a claim in justice to receive a reward proportioned to their merit, a merit
acquired by their efforts. In some contexts it may be relevant to point
out that they did nothing to earn their ability and willingness to work long
hours at hard labor, or that they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work at
all if they hadn’t just happened to be standing in the hiring hall when the
employer walked in. But no one will claim that these facts diminish their
deserts in the case at hand or that it would therefore be perfectly just for
the employer to pay them for fewer hours than they actually worked.
A
theology of economic justice that neglects merit or desert is simply not
addressed to the world of social decisions. What we deserve at the hands of God
is not the same as what we deserve from one another. To suppose that we can
settle the one question by answering the other is to abandon the question of
economic justice altogether.
Perhaps
this is not always recognized in theological statements on economic justice
because those statements are so frequently formulated as antitheses to a system
which seems to exaggerate the role of merit or desert. Defenders of capitalism
often claim that capitalism distributes economic goods justly because it
distributes them on the basis of merit. Those who don’t accept this claim and
who believe that the distribution which occurs under capitalism is unjust may
have responded by rejecting the merit criterion when they should have been
criticizing its application.
There is an important
difference between earning something and having a right to it. Neglect of this
distinction generates confusion on the subject of merit as a criterion of
economic justice. A teenager given the keys to the family car for the evening
has a right to use it. The teenager would be unjustly deprived of a right if
someone else—an older brother, perhaps—saw the car on a theater parking lot and
appropriated it for his own use. This does not imply, however, that the
teenager deserved the right to use the car that evening, or that he would have
been treated unjustly if the keys had been denied. If he had been promised the
use of the car in return for washing and waxing it, then he would indeed have
earned its use, and failure to grant the use would have been unjust.
Defenders
of capitalism sometimes seem to be assuming that all entitlements are earned
entitlements and can therefore be credited to merit. This position cannot be
defended without stretching the concept of earning past the point when it loses
its ordinary meaning. People are sometimes lucky. They may well be entitled to
what came to them as a result of luck, but they cannot properly say they earned
it or that it has accrued to them as a result of their merit. Defenders of
capitalism do their cause a disservice, I believe, when in their eagerness to
establish the moral legitimacy of capitalism they undertake to argue that
people deserve, as a consequence of their merit, whatever they receive in a
competitive capitalist economy.
It
is both interesting and of some theological significance to note the great
difficulty that many of us have in accepting as ours what we aren’t certain we
have earned. Are we consequently tempted to fabricate merit for ourselves so
that we may claim to deserve that to which we are merely entitled? It is not
enough to possess; we want to possess in good conscience, which too often means
that we want to deserve whatever we rightfully possess. Adam and Eve, it seems
to me, did something very similar to this when the serpent raised its guileful
questions.
The mishandling of the
merit criterion, both by defenders and by religious critics of capitalism,
points to what I believe is the gravest flaw in contemporary theological
discussions of economic justice. That flaw is the general failure to perceive
the role and importance of rules.
Since
the position for which I am now going to contend strikes many religious people
as fundamentally immoral, let me begin indirectly, with a question based on an
everyday dilemma.
After
the bus has pulled away from the designated transit zone, should the driver
stop the bus and open the door for someone running to catch it?
Some
passengers will pull the stop signal and call out to the driver when they see a
tardy passenger running to catch the bus. If the driver ignores their signals
and drives on, they may comment disapprovingly: “A mean driver this
morning.” If he does stop, open the door, and wait for the running passenger,
he will, of course, earn the gratitude of the beneficiary; but he may also be
the recipient of approving comments from other passengers: “Someone who likes
people more than schedules.”
My
purpose in recounting this familiar scene is a simple one. Here is a
politically uncharged illustration of the function that rules play in a society
and of the common ethical confusion that results from ignoring that function.
We
begin by noticing that the driver who stops in such a situation is not
necessarily helping people more than the one who does not. He certainly helps
this one passenger—assuming that the driver’s action doesn’t cause an accident!
But in addition to increasing the probability of an accident, the decision to
stop delays all the other passengers on the bus. If the next bus will be along
in 15 minutes, there are 25 other passengers, and the driver’s action delays
them all by 30 seconds, some might argue that the driver’s action produces a
net social benefit of 2½ minutes.
But
this is an unconvincing claim. We can’t compare different people’s minutes in
this manner. The 30-second delay, multiplied by the number of times the driver
acts in this way, could cause a dozen passengers to miss their transfer
connections. Those dozen people might consequently be late for important
meetings, so that eventually many hours of other people’s time is lost in the
process of saving 30 seconds for each of a handful of late-running bus
passengers.
The argument still
involves illegitimate comparisons, however. A minute of one person’s time is not
the moral equivalent of another person’s minute. The principal reason for
rejecting such an equation is not that people in fact value time differently,
although that is certainly true, but rather that punctual people have a right
not to be delayed by tardy people, and the bus driver has an obligation to
respect that right. The man who gets up late does not have a right to delay the
people who arrived at their bus stop on time. He ought to pay the cost of his
tardiness, and it is unfair of him to avoid that cost by shifting all or a part
of it to others.
Suppose,
however, that he overslept because he had been up most of the night tending a
sick child, and now must catch this bus in order to keep a counseling
appointment with a distraught alcoholic who’s contemplating suicide. Would we
want to say in such a case that he, rather than the punctual passengers, ought
to bear the cost of his oversleeping? Doesn’t he deserve commendation rather
than blame? Moreover, it isn’t he but rather the suicidal alcoholic who will
bear the cost of his being late.
All
of this is quite irrelevant, however. The bus driver has no way of knowing
why his passengers are punctual or late, whether they’re embarked on important
errands or simply taking a trip for the fun of it. The driver’s moral
obligation is to provide safe transportation and stay on schedule; the
passengers must assess their own individual circumstances and decide whether or
not to be at the bus stop by the scheduled time. Adherence to these rules will
sometimes produce results inferior to what an omniscient driver could achieve;
but bus drivers are not omniscient.
Moreover,
a driver who elects to disobey the rules is behaving unjustly. He is violating
the rules of the game and benefiting some at the expense of others in an
essentially capricious way. The passengers who applaud his behavior when he
stops in the middle of the street fail to consider the harm he may be inflicting
on others. They may also be quite wrong in assuming that he was motivated by
kindness; he could well be trying to curry favor, secure praise for himself at
the expense of others.
Thinking through this
trivial example helps us see why it will often be more ethical, more socially
responsible, and even more humane to “go by the rules” than to violate the
rules in order to serve the known interests of particular people. We have been
conditioned to believe that it is morally wrong to adhere to rules in
circumstances where we believe our doing so will harm particular people. We are
not used to thinking about the broader consequences for others, or the
long-term consequences for the system in which we’re participating. Not only do
bus drivers make punctual passengers late when they choose to violate the
rules; they also begin to change the relative costs and benefits of adhering to
the rules, which means that the rules start to break down. We would probably be
less sanguine about this consequence if we more fully appreciated the extent of
our dependence upon rule-coordinated social cooperation.
What
we loosely call “the economy” is essentially a system of social cooperation
overwhelmingly dependent for its functioning upon rule-coordinated behavior. If
all the farmers in the United States, for example, decided to devote their time
and other resources to producing what was specifically wanted by the most needy
or otherwise most worthy people they knew, millions of people who are now well
fed would soon starve to death. The production decisions of American farmers
are in fact made for the most part according to a simple rule: choose the
available option from which you expect the largest net revenue. Those who
believe that production for profit is morally inferior to production for use
have apparently never thought through the consequences of what they’re
recommending. They are ignoring the incredible complexity of the system of
social cooperation by means of which we are fed, clothed, housed, warmed,
healed, transported, comforted, entertained, challenged, inspired, educated,
and generally served.
We
must accept and honor rule-coordinated behavior not only in order to maintain
our level of wealth. Justice also demands it. A large society cannot be a just
society unless most of its duties and benefits are allocated in accordance with
established and accepted rules. This truth is in no way confined to the
so-called economic system. A college professor teaching a class of 500 students
must, if she wants to be just, clarify the rules in advance and then apply them
impartially. If a student confronts her with circumstances that the rules had
not contemplated and so do not cover, she must search for a response that can
be generalized. She must not allow some students to take advantage of other
students by securing unique advantages. Each of the 500 students, if pressed,
could probably find an explanation, unrelated to what the student actually
knew, for missing one or more items on the last test. It is fundamentally
unfair to give extra credit exclusively to those students whose obsession with
grades or personal belligerence prompts them to ask for it. If the same
privilege is extended to every student in the class through a general announcement,
it might seem at first that justice would be salvaged. But now the question
arises as to whether the teacher can in fact adequately hear and evaluate the
explanations of 500 students. Justice in large societies requires not only that
general rules binding on all be promulgated, but also that they be applied in a
non-arbitrary manner. The more likely outcomes of such an attempt to apply
personal criteria in a large-society situation are capricious decisions and
poorly-used time.
What would we say about
a judge who discovered that the defendant coming before him on a drunk-driving
charge was his next-door neighbor and nonetheless decided to hear and dispose
of the case? Justice requires that the judge disqualify himself and turn the
case over to someone else. The reason is that he knows the defendant too
well. The judge is consequently in a position to know far more about the
special circumstances of this defendant than he can know in other cases brought
before him. To know all is, in a very important sense, to forgive all. It is
therefore the responsibility of a judge not to know too much about a
particular defendant, so that he can save the lives of many unknown persons by
applying impartially the rule against drunk driving.
A
judge in a small village might be able to act simultaneously as a just judge and
a just neighbor. Justice will sometimes demand that we go beyond impersonal
criteria in allocating burdens and benefits. We are properly horrified by
David’s famous painting of Lucius Junius Brutus and his two sons whom he had
ordered executed for treason; a father owes more than that to the members of
his own family. And it is possible to supply something more than impersonal
justice in a small society where people know one another well. The size of the
society is the crucial issue, however.
It
is hard to see, for example, how a law against loitering could be a just law in
a city of any size. Its application would inevitably leave too much discretion
to police officers who could not know enough to enforce the law fairly,
and who would therefore necessarily enforce it unfairly. It is conceivable, for
the same reason, that the personal discretion which has to be exercised in the
enforcement of any anti-loitering ordinance could be exercised fairly in a
small village. The essential point remains. Justice itself demands that we use
impersonal criteria to allocate burdens and benefits in a large society, where
inescapable limitations on our knowledge make it impossible to take personal considerations
into account in any consistent way.
It seems to me that our
reflections on economic justice would be far more satisfactory if we recognized
the connection between justice and the keeping of promises. I have increasingly
come to think of justice as basically the fulfillment of legitimate
expectations. This definition is faithful to our most fundamental moral
perceptions, I believe, while illuminating a wide range of issues. Injustice is
done, I suggest, when someone’s legitimate expectations are not fulfilled
because others broke their promises.
Sometimes
promises are made explicitly by one person to another. The breaking of such
promises, other than for reasons beyond the control of the promisor, is an injustice
whenever the promisee’s well-being is thereby lessened.
More
often, however, our promises are implicit, part of the unarticulated compacts
that we have with our families, our neighbors, members of our church,
associates at work, plus millions of people whom we will never even meet. I
commit an injustice when I fail to provide family members, friends, or
associates with the assistance, support, or other cooperation that my previous
actions have legitimately led them to expect. We won’t always agree completely
on which expectations are legitimate, because we will inevitably disagree to
some extent about what has been implicitly promised. But we always promise more
than what we spell out formally, because explicit promises entail prior
commitment or tacit assent to a vast network of “background” agreements.
In
this approach to the question of justice, laws can be thought of as promises.
They bind everyone within their jurisdiction to behave or refrain from behaving
in specific ways, and thereby they create legitimate expectations. An unjust
law would be a law that repudiated prior promises; because of the resulting
inconsistency of promises, the expectations that such a law might create would
be less legitimate than the expectations created by a law whose justice was
undisputed.
Customs
and traditions are also promises. Moreover, every society is grounded in some
kind of moral consensus, and the basic principles of that consensus are the
most fundamental promises that the members of the society make to one another.
Because these principles are not fully articulated, they can become mutually
inconsistent in the course of social evolution. This most commonly happens, I
think, when new possibilities for behavior lead to situations in which basic
principles start to yield conflicting promises. The development of such
situations threatens the stability of a society, because it removes, at least
temporarily, the common ground which must exist if disagreements about justice
are to be resolved. At such moments in a society’s history, it is especially
difficult but also especially important for the members of the society to
refrain from caricaturing the positions they are rejecting. The ultimate bond
of any society is its members’ commitment to their common humanity; so long as
that can be preserved, we are not compelled to say “thy blood or mine” and to
settle our disagreements about justice by the naked criterion of force. When we
impute immoral motives to our opponents, we are in effect declaring war on them
by expelling them from the community of moral discourse.
Now
it seems clear that if we make promises or otherwise create expectations that
we cannot subsequently fulfill, we inflict harm on others. It is not true that
they are neither better nor worse off as a result of our promising but not
delivering; they are worse off. People build upon their expectations, and when
those expectations turn out to be illusory, the structures erected on them
collapse. This is a psychological and an economic truth. In both the realm of
feeling and the realm of action, we make investments on the basis of our
expectations. And we sustain a loss when those expectations turn out to have
been overly optimistic. Not every unfulfilled expectation constitutes an
injustice, of course. Some expectations are bound to prove mistaken in a world
characterized by uncertainty. Injustice is done only to people whose
expectations are disappointed by the failure of others to fulfill promises they
were capable of keeping.
A satisfactory theory of
economic justice must recognize not only the importance of honoring
commitments, but also the crucial relationship between the size of the society
and the kinds of promises that can be made and fulfilled within it. The members
of a nuclear family can conscientiously promise to assign tasks among
themselves on the basis of ability and to distribute benefits on the basis of
need. In larger societies, such a promise is impossible. If it is made, it is
made in ignorance. There is simply no way for even one hundred people, much
less 225 million, to acquire the knowledge that would be required in order to
assign tasks on the basis of ability and benefits on the basis of need. We
don’t have to raise the question of whether people would be willing to
make and keep such promises to one another. Incentive is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition. Information is also necessary. This point is important
because religious discussions of economic justice tend to focus on the
incentive issue and to overlook the problem of information. They thereby hold
out the false hope that a “change of heart” would enable us to get rid of
capitalism, or at least of certain features of capitalism that they find
morally objectionable.
Let me say at this point
what I mean by capitalism. I think of it as a social system in which
individuals are free to choose what they will supply and demand, offer and bid,
subject only to general rules known in advance. These rules will be both legal
rules, externally enforced, and moral rules that are internally enforced. I
call capitalism a social system because it is the social rules that determine
whether the society will be capitalist, socialist, or something in between.
Capitalism, in short, is a system of individual freedom under law, where law
does not mean “legislation” but rather the whole body of established rules,
agreements, and conventions by which the members of a society acknowledge
themselves to be bound.
The
engine of the system is the individual’s perception and pursuit of net
advantage. Collective behavior is not excluded, but it must be the product of
the voluntary choices of individuals. The pursuit of one’s net advantage is not
a synonym for greed, selfishness, or materialism. All purposeful human action
is self-interested, in the crucial sense that it aims at goals accepted by the
individual, using means evaluated by the individual. Greed or selfishness, by
contrast, is a matter of claiming for the self more than is due. I would want
to describe greed or selfishness in terms of a failure to fulfill obligations,
and hence as injustice. But the point here is that greed is about as common
under capitalism as it is under any other kind of political system, but no more
common.
Capitalism
is thus by definition an impersonal system. It is not altogether an impersonal
system, because the individuals within it do participate in families and small,
face-to-face associations, where they can know other persons well enough to be
concerned with and to care for their unique qualities. But the distinguishing
characteristic of capitalism is the impersonal nature of the social
interactions that make it up. It can be described paradoxically as a social
system in which people do not care about most of those for whom they care. The
farmer who feeds me does not even know I exist, and while he wishes me no ill,
he does not and cannot care about me in any subjective sense.
Nonetheless, he cares for me, and very effectively, in an objective
sense.
We
are all dependent, throughout our lives, for our actual survival as well as our
many comforts, upon the assistance and cooperation of millions of people whom
we will never know and who do not know us. They help us to fulfill our aims in
life not because they know or care what happens to us, but because this enables
them to fulfill their own aims most effectively. They are motivated by
their own interests, whatever these may be. They are guided by the rules
of the society and their perception of the expected net advantages from
alternative decisions. These net advantages, or structures of expected costs
and benefits, are created by the similarly motivated and guided efforts of
everyone else in the society.
Marx was thus correct.
He saw more clearly than most of his pro-capitalist contemporaries that
capitalism was a system based on commodity production. It had
replaced (by supplementing, I would argue, more than by
displacing) a system based on relations of personal dependence. Thereby, as
Marx and Engels observed in the first part of The Communist Manifesto, capitalism
had achieved productive wonders. Their mistake, and the mistake of so many who
followed them, was in supposing that capitalism could be replaced in turn by a
system of production based on “socialist relations,” a system retaining the
productive powers of capitalism while assigning tasks on the basis of ability
and distributing the product according to need.
I suspect that the deepest
root of this belief, a belief remarkably immune to either theory or evidence,
is the conviction that an impersonal social system is morally unacceptable. I
maintain that this is a tragically mistaken prejudice. Impersonal does not mean
inhumane, as we sometimes carelessly assume. Nonetheless, our model for the
good society seems to be the family, where production is from each according to
ability and distribution is to each according to need and merit (though we tend
to underestimate the actual importance of the merit criterion in thinking about
family distribution decisions).
The religious heritage
of Western thought pushes in the same direction. The Old Testament’s criticism
of economic behavior often presupposes a society small enough and sufficiently
close-knit for its members to care about as well as for one
another. A more prominent feature of this literature, in my judgment, is its
emphasis on impartial administration of the rules; but this feature has rarely
been noticed by those who turn to the Old Testament for passages with which to
support their concern for economic justice. The New Testament emphasis upon
love as the fulfillment of all law has further reinforced our inclination to
suppose that impersonal relations are somehow morally deficient relations.
Our basic mistake may be
the belief that we must choose between personal, face-to-face societies and
impersonal societies. If we accept as fully legitimate the impersonal,
rule-coordinated societies in which we participate, we are not repudiating or
depreciating in any way marriage, the family, intimacy, I-thou relationships,
the unique value of the individual, or the power and significance of personal
caring and sacrifice. If we were in fact compelled to repudiate all of this in
order to enjoy the benefits that only large and hence impersonal societies can
provide, we would be foolish to opt for those benefits. In the long run that
choice would deprive us of the advantages of both worlds, because the moral
values essential to the successful operation of a rule-coordinated society can
only be nurtured in personal societies.
But we are not forced
to choose. We are tempted to choose, it is true, and from both directions. The
expanding wealth of opportunities that the impersonal society lays before us
makes us progressively less dependent (or so we believe) on particular other
persons. As we enlarge our individual freedom and power, we simultaneously
declare our continual independence. We view commitments as entanglements and we
work toward fuller emancipation. That kind of freedom is really perpetual
mobility, and I doubt that it is ultimately compatible with the institutions
and virtues of personal community.
My
primary concern in this paper, however, is the temptation coming from the other
direction, a temptation whose appeal might be in large part a function of the
anxiety that many of us feel about the decline of personal community in our own
lives. Many of the “best people” in our society, including theologians,
denominational leaders, and deeply religious people, sincerely believe that
economic justice requires the destruction of rule-coordinated societies.
Moreover, they are committed to the belief that they may legitimately use the
coercive power of state legislation to accomplish this goal. They seem
determined to do so, with little thought about what justice might actually
entail and often the most superficial attention to what occurs in the
democratic legislative process.
Legislation
that aims at the achievement of economic justice cannot succeed in this purpose
unless the promises that it offers are genuine, realistic, and not in
themselves unjust. Legislators often hold out promises of benefits, for
vote-gathering purposes, when they have no intention of enacting the enabling
legislation which would impose the requisite costs on the public.19 For very similar reasons legislators will
sometimes refuse to consider the consequences of what they are doing; it is not
in their interest to recognize, much less to admit, that a bill which offers
electoral gains to those who support it cannot in fact achieve its stated
purposes. Legislation of this kind is unjust legislation because it
deliberately creates expectations that will not be fulfilled.
Particularly
common and troubling is the tendency of democratically-controlled legislatures
to defend special-interest legislation on the grounds that it secures economic
justice for its beneficiaries, while ignoring the injustices that this
legislation will impose on others. The most familiar and to my mind most
disturbing contemporary example is the arbitrary expropriation, through
legislated rent controls, of people who have invested in residential rental
property.
Those
who draft the “social concern” statements of church bodies too often endorse
this kind of legislated injustice, apparently because they can think of no way
to measure economic justice except by looking at the pattern of outcomes. They
are not deterred by their inability to provide a coherent, applicable, and
defensible definition of a just pattern of outcomes. Meanwhile they ignore or
repudiate in their official pronouncements some of the most basic principles of
justice that they themselves use in their everyday, “real world” activity. The
fundamental dependence of justice in a large society upon adherence to general
rules is almost totally overlooked.
What
do religious pronouncements about economic justice really accomplish? What
interests do they serve? Those are the pressing questions with which I find
myself left. But they would be questions for some other study.