Over the course of this journey, we've explored three approaches to justice. One says justice means maximizing utility or welfare - the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The second says justice means respecting freedom of choice - either the actual choices people make in a free market (the librarian view) or the hypothetical choices people would make in an original position of equality (the liberal egalitarian view). The third says justice involves cultivating virtue and reasoning about the common good. As you've probably guessed by now, I favor a version of the third approach. Let me try to explain why.
The utilitarian approach has two defects: First, it makes justice and rights a matter of calculation, not principle. Second, by trying to translate all human goods into a single, uniform measure of value, it flattens them, and takes no account of the qualitative differences among them.
The freedom-based theories solve the first problem but not the second. They take rights seriously and insist that justice is more than mere calculation. Although they disagree among themselves about which rights should outweigh utilitarian consecrations, they agree that certain rights are fundamental and must be respected. But beyond singling out certain rights as worthy of respect, they accept people's preferences as they are. They don't require us to question or challenge the preferences and desires we bring to public life. According to these theories, the moral worth of the ends we pursue, the meaning and significance of the lives we lead, and the quality and character of the common life. We share all lie beyond the domain of justice.
This seems to me mistaken. A just society can't be achieved seemly by maximizing utility or by securing freedom of choice. To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise.
It is tempting to seek a principle or procedure that could justify once and for all, whatever distribution of income or power or opportunity resulted from it. Such a principle, if we could find it, would enable us to avoid the tumult and contention that arguments about the good life invariably arouse.
But these arguments are impossible to avoid. Justice is inescapably judgmental. Whether we're arguing about financial bailouts or Purple Hearts, surrogate mother hood or same-sex marriage, affirmative action or military service, CEO pay or the right to use a golf cart, questions of justice are bound up with competing notions or honor and virtue, pride and recognition. Just is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things.
CITIZENSHIP, SACRIFICE AND SERVICE
IF A JUST SOCIETY REQUIRES A STRONG SENSE OF COMMUNITY, IT MUST FIND A WAY TO CULTIVATE IN CITIZENS A CONCERN FOR THE WHOLE, A DEDICATION TO THE COMMON GOOD. IT CAN'T BE INDIFFERENT TO THE ATTITUDES AND DISPOSITIONS, the "habits of the heart," that citizens bring the public life. It must find a way to lean against purely privatized notions of the good life, and cultivate civic virtue.
Traditionally, the public school has been a site of civic education. In some generations, the military has been another. I'm referring not mainly to the explicit teaching of civic virtue, but to the practical, often inadvertent civic education that takes place when young people from different economic classes, religious backgrounds, and ethnic communities come together in common institutions.
THE MORAL LIMITS OF MARKETS
One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and market-oriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. In earlier chapters, we consider the moral questions that arise, for example, when countries hire out military service and the interrogation of prisoners to mercenaries or private contractors; or when parents outsource pregnancy and child bearing to paid laborers in the developing world, or when people by and sell kidneys on the open market. Other instances abound: Should students in under-performing schools be offered cash payments for scoring well on standardized tests? Should teachers be giving bonuses for improving the est results of their students? Should states hire for profit prison companies to house their inmates? Should the United States simplify its immigration policy by adopting the proposal of a University of Chicago economist to sell U.S. citizenship for a $100,000 fee?
These questions are not only about utility and consent. They are also about the right ways of valuing key social practices - military service, child bearing, teaching and learning, criminal punishment, the admission of new citizens, and so on. Since marketing social practices may corrupt or degrade the norms that define them, we need to ask what non-market norms we want to protect from market intrusion. This is a question that requires public debate about competing conceptions for the right way of valuing goods. Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.
INEQUALITY, SOLIDARITY, AND CIVIC VIRTUE
Within the United States, the gap between rich and poor has grown in recent decades, reaching levels not seen since the 1930s. Yet inequality has not loomed large as a political issue.
Some philosophers who would tax the rich to help the poor argue in the name of utility; taking a hundred dollars from a a rich person and giving it to a poor person will diminish the rich person's happiness only slightly, they speculate, but greatly increase the happiness of the poor person. John Rawls also defends redistribution, but on the grounds of hypothetical consent. He argues that if we imagined a hypothetical social contract in an original position of equality, everyone would agree to a principle that would sport some form of redistribution.
But there is a third, more important reason to worry about the growing inequality of American life: Too great a gap between rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires. Here's ow: As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives. The affluent send their children to private schools (or to the children of families who have no alternative. A similar trend leads o the secession by the privileged from other public institutions and facilities. Private health clubs replace municipal recreation centers and swimming pools. Upscale residential communities hire private security guards and rely less on public police protection. A second or third car removes the need to rely on public transportation. And so on. The affluent secede from public places and services, leaving them to those who can't afford anything else.
This has two bad effects, one fiscal, the other civic. First public services deteriorate, as those who no longer use those services become less willing to support them with their taxes. Second, public institutions such as schools, parks, playgrounds, and community centers cease another. Institutions that once gathered people together and served as informal schools of civic virtue become few and far between. The hollowing out of the public realm makes it difficult to cultivate the solidarity and sense of community on which democratic citizenship depends.
So, quite apart from its effects on utility or consent, inequality can be corrosive to civic virtue. Conservatives enamored of markets and liberals concerned with redistribution overlook this loss.
If the erosion of the public realm is the problem, what is the solution? A politics of the common good would take as one of its primary goals the reconstruction of the infrastructure of civic life. Rather than focus on redistribution for the sake of broadening access to private consumption, it would tax the affluent to rebuild public institutions and services so that rich and poor alike would want to take advantage of them.
An earlier generation made a massive investment in the federal highway program, which gave Americans unprecedented individual mobility and freedom, but also contributed to the reliance of the private automobile, suburban sprawl, environmental degradation, and living patterns corrosive to community. This generation could commit itself to an equally consequential investment in an infrastructure for civic renewal: public schools to which rich and poor alike would want to send their children; public transportation systems reliable enough to attract upscale commuters; and public health clinics, playgrounds, parks, recreation centers, libraries, and museums that would, ideally at least, draw people out of their gated communities and into the common spaces of a shared democratic citizenship.
Focusing on the civic consequences of inequality, and ways of reversing them, might find political traction that arguments about income distribution as such do not. It would also help highlight the connection between distributive justice and the common good.
A POLITICS OF MORAL ENGAGEMENT
Some consider public engagement with questions of the good life to be a civic transgression, a journey beyond the bounds of liberal public reason. Politics and law should NOT become entangled in moral and religious disputes, we often think, for such entanglement opens the way to coercion and intolerance. This is a legitimate worry. Citizens of pluralist societies do disagree about morality and religion. Even if, as I've argued, it's not possible for government to be neutral on these disagreements, is it nonetheless possible to conduct our politics on the basis of mutual respect?
The answer, I think, is yes. But we need a more robust and engaged civic life than the one to which we've become accustomed.In recent decades, we've come to assume that respecting out fellow citizen's moral and religious convictions means ignoring them (for political purposes, at least), leaving them undisturbed, and conducting our public life, insofar as possible, without reference to them. But this stance of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it. This can provoke backlash and resentment. It can also make for an impoverished public discourse, lurching from one news cycle to the next, preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensation, and the trivial.
A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker, basis for mutual respect. Rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions that our fellow citizens bring to public life, we should attend to them ore directly - sometimes by challenging and contesting them, sometimes by listening to and learning from them. There is no guarantee that public deliberation about hard moral questions will lead in any giving situation to agreement - or even to appreciation for the moral and religious views of others. It's always possible that learning more about a moral or religious doctrine will lead us to like it less. But we cannot know until we try.
A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.
Michael Sandel, Justice - What is the Right Thing to do ?
Michael Sandel, Justice - What is the Right Thing to do ?