Notes on whether John Rawls's "Difference Principle" provides a social minimum for the undeserving lazy as well as the deserving hard workers

February 12, 2005

Dear Mark,

Here’s my best answer to your question of last Tuesday. I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful then, but I was really feeling dull: not enough sleep, not enough blood sugar.

As you can see from what I’ve written below, there are quite a few facets to the answer, and it has been helpful to me to go through them.

If I understand you correctly, you are asking how Rawls can justify the difference principle when it does not distinguish between those worst-off people who are worst-off because of forces beyond their control (e.g., illness) and those who are worst-off because they simply choose not to work, relying for their survival on the generosity and hard work of others. Another way of phrasing this is that people should be rewarded for their deserts (what they deserve; their moral deserts) and some people don’t deserve anything. (The specific example you cited was a neighbor of yours who has a disabled daughter and who uses her support payments to sit on his porch all day swilling beer. I’ll call this guy “Bruno” for convenience.)

I. The first thing to ask is whether Rawls is truly saying that. Are we merely misinterpreting the meaning of the difference principle? I raise this issue just to acknowledge its possibility, but I don’t think the issue is one of misinterpretation, esp. after reading Section 48 (“Legitimate Expectations and Moral Desert”). However, a comment from Steve Vanderheiden leads me to add the following two clarifications:

• People can always renounce the basic goods (and liberties) they are entitled to by Rawls's theory. Monks, for example, may choose to lead a life of poverty. They would not be considered "worst off", regardless of their poverty, because they could freely re-claim their rights under the difference principle to at least the minimum level of basic goods. However, this is not Bruno's situation; as we imagine the situation, he is definitely claiming that social minimum.
• "Advantaged" and "disadvantaged" can be understood as referring either to people's natural talents (what we might call the "input" side) or to the level of basic goods people are able to claim in the society given those talents (what we might call the "output" side). Rawls regards people's natural talents as a collective pool which society can arrange in response to the dictates of the justice, but as used in the difference principle, the term "least advantaged" refers to the output side. Regardless of his natural talents, Bruno is not required to use them and would thus wind up (presumably) among the least advantaged in the society.

II. Rawls bases his claims on a reflective equilibrium among three elements: (a) our sense of what would be agreed to in the original position, (b) our existing, settled intuitions about justice, and (c) our understanding of what constitutes a good life for oneself (and humans generally). In the case of your question, these elements would take the form of three concerns: (a) that the difference principle would not be agreed to in the original position, at least not in a way that ignores issues of moral desert; (b) that our settled sense of justice tells us that giving things to the undeserving is unjust; and (c) the difference principle’s merits as a principle of justice are not consonant with its merits as a part of a human’s sense of the good. None of these criticisms is decisive, but Rawls’s demand for reflective equilibrium means that any one of these can at least call the principle into question. In these terms, you are raising an objection of the (b) form and possibly of the (c) form. In terms of (b), you are saying that your settled sense of justice tells you that it is wrong to reward the undeserving. In terms of (c), you are saying that even if somehow you could be convinced that the difference principle was just, it doesn’t square with your sense of what it means to live a good life or to be a good person. It seems to imply a sense of the good that, whatever else it has, lacks respect for hard work.  [Requires sainthood.]

So: I hope that I have characterized your objections fairly and in particular that putting them into the Rawlsian framework (a-b-c) has not distorted them.

III. Let’s take up (a) first: why would we not establish a desert-based distribution principle in the original position?

●        Note that your rejection of the original position can’t be final, because the only objection you gave to the original position was that it doesn’t come up with the answer you want. To reach reflective equilibrium, we must recognize what it has to tell us, since the original position does seem to express so many of our intuitions about justice, even if we ultimately decide that its perspective must give way to others.

●        Rawls’s basic argument (Section 48, esp. pp.274/2 - 275/2) is that there can be no coherent sense of desert in the original position. We simply don’t know enough about society to develop such a sense, and our sense of moral desert must depend on people’s behavior within a set of just institutions — and justice has not yet been defined.  (And we are not in a well-ordered society.)

●        Within the original position, we don’t know if we will be considered “deserving” within the society we are creating, and personally, I would hate to be in a situation where I was frozen out by someone else’s judgment that I was undeserving. I don’t trust other people’s judgments enough to let them govern my entire life in that way. So in the original position I, at least, would not allow “desert” to be part of the basic principles of justice.

●        Another way of recognizing my previous point is to see that Bruno is making a contribution to the society. He is contributing to the society simply by being a law-abiding citizen. Even if he turns out not to be law-abiding, he has at least consented in the original position to being arrested and jailed per our just system of laws. And even if he protests when we arrest him that he doesn’t consent to the laws, we can still hold him accountable on the grounds that the time to protest the laws is in the original position (or the constitutional stage, etc.), not when the veil of ignorance has been dropped. In some sense, we are purchasing his and everyone’s agreement by recognizing their legitimate claims simply as members of a group contracting with each other and willing to be regulated by the contract.

●        One additional argument, which I don’t find Rawls making but which I will make anyway, is an analogy with his argument about tolerating the intolerant (Section 35). There, he argues that we can tolerate the intolerant in hopes of leading them to tolerance by example, withdrawing this tolerance only when their intolerance is an immediate threat to our system of liberties. So I make the analogous argument that in situations where we can afford to support some lazy people, we might do so and expect that our own efforts will lead them to work. It seems to me that beating people into working is rarely successful, certainly in comparison with the benefits of having people take up their responsibilities willingly. You might think about your own motivations for working — do you work simply because you will starve if you don’t, or does work itself provide satisfaction? I will take up this issue again when I get to (c).

IV. Let’s now take up the arguments of (b), which I might characterize as follows: “Regardless of all that ivory tower b.s. about the original position, the fact remains that I’m looking across the street at a social parasite, and it just doesn’t seem right that I work to support his lazy, beer-swilling ass.” (The pungent language is not meant disrespectfully but rather to evoke and emphasize the emotional force of the objection.)

●        Let me say first that I understand the feeling. However, as I try to say below, I’ve come to see it as stemming from an illusion, not from reality.

●        "Bruno" is a straw man. Or to put this another way your position is not reversible. Bruno might see you as born with all the advantages, from the height of which you look down on him. In general, we don’t know what others experience, what challenges they face — or what advantages they have, for that matter. I know that my first impulse when looking at others is to see all the challenges that face me and all the advantages that appear to benefit them. So I look at Bruno and see, as expressed above, nothing more than a beer-swilling layabout living a life of ease while I have to go out and wring my living from a hostile (or at least uncaring) world. However, the truth is that I have little idea of Bruno’s actual circumstances. Perhaps he has an illness that does not permit him to work. Perhaps he has no way to care for his daughter and work at the same time. Perhaps no one will hire him, given his constraints (e.g., the hours he is forced to work when juggling child care). Perhaps he is retarded himself. Perhaps he is an alcoholic. Perhaps he made a bad decision a long time ago — to drop out of school, perhaps — and is unable to find his way out of the pickle he’s in. Everyone makes mistakes and has problems, so my more considered impulse (after the first one of condemnation, as I said above) is to think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

     In general, we can’t be relied on to make accurate assessments. We tend to contrast our life as we know it, excusing our own difficulties, with others’ lives as we believe them to be, giving them no excuses and allowing them no difficulties. So you see yourself as hardworking and Bruno as a beer-swilling layabout, while Bruno might see the situation in opposite terms: seeing himself as saddled alone to care for a retarded daughter while you get to grow up in a loving home and go off to college and a high-paid job. And that gives rise to a politics of resentment: resenting people for their seeming ability to get what they want with ease while you feel your own difficulties so keenly. In my experience, it rarely gets us anywhere to point fingers at each other; there’s no moral high ground from which people can reliably judge others. Our illusion is that we possess such a moral high ground ourselves, but that is indeed just an illusion. You might relate this to what I said at the beginning of the course: no one knows who is right, or at least knows what is right so well as to guarantee that no one can ever shed new light on the subject, possibly a light that will even transform one’s own position.

     No one is “deserving”, including you. I have found in my own life that once I get on the merry-go-round of “desert”, it’s impossible to get off. I can’t forgive myself; I’m always aware of my own imperfections; I never tolerate the slightest time off, etc. Think of yourself: did you study enough for the last exam? Couldn’t you have read more, thought more, done better? Did you sleep that extra hour in the morning? Did you go out drinking on Saturday night when you could have been at home studying? Like I say, once one gets on the merry-go-round, it’s impossible to get off. You find yourself — I find myself — having to criticize others as a displacement of my criticism of myself. I have to turn the merry-go-round faster and faster, hurling the others off as they lose their grip, but also having to grip ever harder. If we wish to be able to forgive ourselves (and be forgiven by others), we have to be able to forgive others.

V. Finally, let’s consider the objections of (c), that this attitude conflict with concerns about individual virtue, neglecting the good of hard work and whitewashing laziness. Here the emphasis is not on what we owe other people but rather what it means to be a good person to oneself, as it were.

●        Justice as a part of the good: Rawls’s first argument is that a sense of justice is a part of every person’s sense of the good. Much of Part III is devoted to that. (I’m writing in haste now, so I don’t have specific section references.)

●        The “Aristotelian principle”: Rawls claims that every person’s sense of the good includes a desire to develop and exercise h/her talents, not for the benefit they bring others but rather for the pleasure of doing so, a pleasure he holds is universal. If this principle is indeed a part of every person’s good, then we need not worry so much about freeloaders. Or, as I indicated in the footnote, the existence of a large number of freeloaders might mean that we need to look at the conditions of work being offered in our economic system.

●        One might still ask, “If the Aristotelian principle fails or isn’t as powerful as you are suggesting, why should I support the development of others’ talents when they aren’t supporting mine?” The best answer I can give is that other principles would seem to be involved: the virtues of mercy, toleration, and non-judgmentalness. I’m referring here to (say) mercy not as a principle of justice but rather as a way one would want to live one’s own life, i.e., as a part of one’s own sense of the good, a part of living up to one’s own sense of being a virtuous human being.

I hope that these elements explain why I, at least, am comfortable with Rawls’s difference principle even in the face of what looks like other people’s freeloading. If the freeloading becomes so extensive that it outweighs the above factors, then of course I’d have to reconsider. But right now it seems to me that we are nowhere near that point; that what is at work is a sense of resentment rather than a true sense of injustice.

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