Justice: What Do We Owe Each Other? — Ethics 6 (C1)

ETHICS · LESSON 6

Justice: What Do We Owe Each Other?

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Where do you stand?

Task Judge each act. Write a letter for each.

P = permissible · N = not permissible · D = it depends

1. A football club pays its star player 500 times a nurse's salary.

2. A country taxes all inheritances above a modest amount at 70 per cent.

3. A university reserves a fifth of its places for students from the poorest districts.

4. A city gives every adult resident a small monthly income, whether or not they work.

5. A private clinic treats paying patients within a week, while the public waiting list is eight months.

READING

Behind the veil

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) asks what principles should govern the basic structure of a society: its constitution, its economy and the institutions that shape people's prospects from birth.

Imagine people choosing those principles in an original position, behind a veil of ignorance. They do not know their class or wealth, their sex or ethnicity, their natural talents, strength or intelligence, or even their own religion and idea of a good life. They do know the general facts of

economics and psychology. Since nobody can bend the rules in their own favour, whatever they agree to is fair. Rawls called his theory justice as fairness.

Rawls argued that the parties would choose two principles. First, every person has an equal right to the basic liberties: freedom of thought, conscience, speech and association, political rights and the rule of law.

READING · CONTINUED

Behind the veil

Second, social and economic inequalities are allowed only if they are attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This last condition is the difference principle. The first principle has priority: liberty may not be traded for economic gain.

Why choose the difference principle? The choice is made once, it binds for life, and nobody knows the odds of landing in any particular

position. In those conditions, Rawls argued, the rational rule is maximin: choose the arrangement whose worst outcome is the best. This still allows inequality. A surgeon may earn far more than a cleaner, as long as that inequality leaves the worst-off better off than they would be without it.

The best-known objection came from the economist John Harsanyi. He argued that rational people behind the veil would choose to maximise average welfare instead, and that maximin is far too cautious.

Sorrel Island: write the rules

Task Groups of 3 or 4. You are founding a new society, and you do not know who you will be in it. Agree one rule, in one sentence, for each of the three topics. Do not read the slide "Draw your position" until your rules are written.

The island

About 1,000 settlers. Good farmland, a fishing fleet, a small harbour and one hospital. People will differ in health, talent, age, family wealth and luck, as they do everywhere.

1. Healthcare: Who pays for treatment, and who is treated first?

2. Inheritance: What happens to a person's property when they die?

3. Income: Will there be a guaranteed minimum income? If so, how high, and who pays for it?

If you finish early, add a fourth rule on any topic you like.

Draw your position

Task Your teacher will send you a number privately. That number is your life on Sorrel Island. For each of your group's three rules, write Accept or Reject from your position, with one reason. Then tell your group who you are. Would you now change any rule?

1

The owner of the island's fishing fleet, which she inherited from her father.

6

A designer who works online for clients abroad and could live anywhere.

2

A surgeon at the only hospital, the island's highest earner.

7

A newcomer who arrived last year and speaks the island's language badly.

3

A fisher with a chronic illness that needs expensive medicine.

8

A carer who looks after a disabled brother full time, unpaid.

4

A child of eight whose parents have no savings.

9

A brilliant athlete whose matches draw paying crowds from neighbouring islands.

5

A farmer of 70, too old to work the land.

10

A shopkeeper with two employees and modest savings.

READING

Liberty upsets patterns

Robert Nozick, Rawls's colleague at Harvard, replied three years later in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). His entitlement theory says that what you hold is just if you acquired it justly (justice in acquisition), received it through a voluntary exchange or gift (justice in transfer), or received it to correct an earlier injustice (rectification). Justice is historical: it depends on how a distribution came about, not on its shape. Nozick contrasted this with patterned principles, which say that shares

should follow some feature such as need, merit or effort, and with end-state principles, which judge the distribution itself, as Rawls's difference principle does.

His most famous argument asks you to start from whatever distribution you think is just. Now the basketball star Wilt Chamberlain signs a contract: 25 cents from every ticket goes to him. A million fans gladly pay, and he ends the season with $250,000, far more than anyone else.

READING · CONTINUED

Liberty upsets patterns

Everyone began with a just share, and every transfer was voluntary. On what grounds, Nozick asks, could the new distribution be unjust? Keeping any pattern in place would mean constantly interfering with what people freely do with their shares: liberty upsets patterns. He went further, arguing that taxing earnings is "on a par with forced labor", because it takes the product of some of a person's working hours.

Critics answer that real holdings rarely have a clean history: conquest,

theft and seizure run through the past of much of the world's property. Nozick accepted the point in principle, and suggested that correcting past injustice might, in the short run, require a state larger than the minimal one he defended. Others ask whether the fans also agreed to the influence that Chamberlain's new wealth might give him over everyone else.

Other answers

Desert

People should get what they deserve for their effort, contribution or merit. Aristotle held that fair shares are proportional to merit, while noting that people disagree about what merit is.

Need

Goods go first to those who need them most, as in hospital triage or famine relief.

Equality of opportunity

Everyone should have a fair start. Formal equality means that positions are open to all. Fair equality means that equally talented and motivated people have equal chances, whatever family they were born into. Different outcomes are then acceptable.

Equality of outcome

Fairness is judged by where people end up, not only by where they start.

Amartya Sen asked "Equality of what?" in a 1979 lecture. Not income or happiness, he argued, but capabilities: what each person is actually able to do and be. A bicycle gives mobility only to someone who can ride, is allowed to, and has roads. Martha Nussbaum later proposed a list of ten central capabilities.

Capabilities

The ultimatum game

Task Play by private message to your teacher. Never show your number to your partner.

1. Proposers: you have 100 coins. Send your teacher the number of coins you offer your Responder, from 0 to 100. You keep the rest.

2. Responders: before you hear your offer, send your teacher the lowest offer you would accept.

3. Your teacher tells each Responder their offer. Reply accept or reject. If you accept, you both get the split. If you reject, you both get nothing.

4. Your teacher shows all the results, without names.

5. Round 2: swap roles. This time, imagine the 100 coins are a month's wages.

REVEAL · READING

What the experiments found

The ultimatum game was first studied experimentally by the economists Werner Güth, Rolf Schmittberger and Bernd Schwarze in 1982. A purely self-interested Responder should accept any offer above zero, since something beats nothing. Knowing this, a self-interested Proposer should offer the smallest possible amount. People do not play like this. In industrialised societies the average offer is usually close to 44 per cent of the stake, and offers below 20 per cent are rejected between 40 and 60 per cent of the time. Many Responders will pay to punish

what they see as unfairness.

Is this human nature, or culture? Joseph Henrich and colleagues ran the game in 15 small-scale societies, in 12 countries on five continents, and published the results in 2001. No society behaved as the purely self-interested model predicts, but the variation was striking: average offers ranged from 26 to 58 per cent. Among the Machiguenga of Peru, who live and work largely in independent family units, the mean offer was 26 per cent.

REVEAL · READING · CONTINUED

What the experiments found

Responders rejected only one offer, although more than three quarters of offers were below 30 per cent. Among the Lamalera of Indonesia, who hunt whales in large canoes crewed by a dozen or more, the mean offer was 58 per cent. The Au and Gnau of Papua New Guinea rejected unfairly low and over-generous offers about equally often. The researchers linked this to local gift-giving, in which accepting a large gift creates an obligation to repay. Two features of daily life explained about two thirds of the differences between groups: how much people

relied on markets, and how much they gained from cooperating beyond the family. Individual age, sex and wealth did not predict offers.

Two cautions. Most behavioural research uses what Henrich and others later called WEIRD samples: Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. And a game with coins is not real life, though stakes matter less than you might think: in Indonesia, Lisa Cameron (1999) raised them to about three months' spending, and Proposers' offers barely changed.

The last flat

The flat

Linden Court Housing Cooperative, in the city of Valmora, has one ground-floor flat free, at half the city's market rent. Its five-person committee must choose between four applicants. The written rules say a flat goes to whoever has waited longest, but the committee may make an exception "in cases of serious need".

The last flat

A

Grace Mensah, 34, intensive-care nurse

B

The Farouk family

Works night shifts at the city hospital and commutes 90 minutes each way. Top of the waiting list for six years. Under the written rules, the flat is hers.

Two parents and three children, living in one rented room since the father's restaurant closed. The eldest, aged 15, has no space to study and is falling behind at school. On the list for eight months.

C

D

Kenji Watanabe, 52, wheelchair user

Rosa Delgado, 71, founding member

His fourth-floor flat has no lift, so he leaves home about once a week. This is the only step-free flat the cooperative expects to have for years. On the list for two years.

Helped to build the cooperative 40 years ago and ran it, unpaid, for 20. Her building has been sold, and she must leave the neighbourhood where her friends and her doctor are. The committee chair has known her all his life.

Four lenses: the last flat

Task Groups of 3 or 4. Judge the case on the slide "The last flat" through each lens in turn. For each lens, write the applicant it points to and one reason. Then agree a group verdict: who gets the flat, and one sentence you would say to the other three applicants.

Consequences

Duty

Character

Relationships

What will happen?

What rule applies?

What would a good person do?

Who am I to them?

The last flat

Four lenses: the last flat

1. Consequences

2. Duty

What will happen? Which choice does the most good and the least harm?

What rule applies? What do the cooperative's rules, promises and rights require?

3. Character

4. Relationships

What would a good person do? What would a fair and compassionate committee member do?

Who am I to them? What do the committee and the cooperative owe each applicant?

If you finish early: which of today's theories supports your verdict? Rawls, Nozick, desert, need or capabilities?

What do we owe each other?

Task Choose three or four questions. Spend most of your time on the one your group disagrees about.

1. Is it unfair that some people are born more talented than others, or simply bad luck?

2. Not knowing who you would be, would you rather be born into Rawls's society or Nozick's?

3. Is passing wealth to your children a family's right, or an unfair head start?

4. Where you live, are high incomes usually seen as earned, or as luck?

5. Do we owe more to fellow citizens than to strangers in other countries?

6. If people reject unfair offers at a cost to themselves, is fairness part of human nature?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a time when you, or someone you know, felt that something was shared out unfairly. Which of today's ideas of justice explains that feeling best?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

How do your friends or family split a restaurant bill? Which theory of justice does that rule follow, and would you change it?

Back to where you stood

Task Look again at your letters for acts 2 and 4 on the slide "Where do you stand?". Would you change either of them now?

P = permissible · N = not permissible · D = it depends

2. A country taxes all inheritances above a modest amount at 70 per cent.

4. A city gives every adult resident a small monthly income, whether or not they work.

Before Lesson 7

This week, notice one decision about who gets what, and work out which principle it followed.

Gut

It might be a bonus at work, a queue, a school place, a prize or a family inheritance. Was it desert, need, entitlement, equality, or something else?

or

Next lesson: Moral Psychology: Gut or Reason? Do we reason our way to moral verdicts, or feel first and find the reasons afterwards? The angry "reject" in the ultimatum game is a clue.

Reason

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key

THE ULTIMATUM GAME

The purely self-interested prediction: the Proposer offers the smallest possible amount (1 coin), and the Responder accepts, because 1 coin is better than nothing. Any room result above that is the point of the slide "What the experiments found".

FOUR LENSES: THE LAST FLAT possible readings, not answers; every applicant can be defended

1 Consequences: C (Kenji) gains most: a step-free flat transforms what he can do, and no other will come for years. B (the Farouks) houses five people and protects a child's education. A's shorter commute may help her patients.

2 Duty: A (Grace). The written rule and the promise implied by six years on the list point to her. The "serious need" exception is the opening for B or C, but not obviously for D.

3 Character: Fairness and integrity favour A, or a careful use of the exception; compassion pulls towards B, C or D. A good chair would declare his friendship with D and step out of the decision.

4 Relationships: D (Rosa). The cooperative arguably owes gratitude to a founding member who served it unpaid for 20 years. The same lens exposes the chair's conflict of interest.

• Theories: Rawls's difference principle points to the least advantaged (B or C); Nozick to the rules the members freely agreed to (A); desert to D, or to A's essential work; need to B or C; capabilities most clearly to C.