If You're an Egalitarian, You Shouldn't Be So Rich

Chris Freiman and I have a new paper out by this title at The Journal of Ethics, the same journal that published G. A. Cohen's "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?"

Abstract:

G.A. Cohen famously claims that egalitarians shouldn’t be so rich. If you possess excess income and there is little chance that the state will redistribute it to the poor, you are obligated to donate it yourself. We argue that this conclusion is correct, but that the case against the rich egalitarian is significantly stronger than the one Cohen offers. In particular, the standard arguments against donating one’s excess income face two critical, unrecognized problems. First, we show that these arguments imply that citizens have no duty to further egalitarian political institutions—a conclusion that Cohen’s Rawlsian opponents cannot abide. Second, these arguments yield unacceptable implications for other questions of justice. We conclude that even moderately rich egalitarians are obligated to donate their excess income.

In philosophy and elsewhere, it's funny how frequently you encounter professed egalitarians who live high while people die, who seek and flaunt high status, and yet who somehow think themselves kindly and sympathetic because they defend egalitarian redistribution in obscure journals. One New York-area egalitarian of high stature was reputed to make grad students pay for his fancy dinners for the privilege of eating with him.

This paper considers and refutes a number of reasons egalitarians have offered on behalf of the claim that they are not obligated to donate their excess income (to government, to an NGO, or directly to those worse off): 

1. Structuralism: Justice applies only to the basic structure and not to personal behavior

2. There is a division of labor; individuals are not charged with promoting justice directly.

3. Donations are a "drop in the ocean"; they do not change the overall distribution much.

4. Donations don't change the causes of inequality.

5. We have an obligation to support just institutions, not to promote equality directly.

6. Paying taxes is less burdensome than giving to charity. 

7. We don't have the assurance others will do their part, and it's unfair/etc. if I give when I can't be sure others will.

8. Proper egalitarianism allows for some inequality. For instance, no one should make less than a post-doc and more than a chaired law professor at Yale. Therefore, since all of us richer professors are within the upper limit, we are not required to give, though perhaps even richer egalitarians (such as Bernie Sanders or most leftie movie stars) are. 

We have a number of responses to each kind of argument. Sometimes we show the arguments are simply badly formed or question-begging. We frequently show that each of these arguments leads to other absurd or deeply unpalatable conclusions that the egalitarians who make such arguments would not want to endorse. None of this arguments work. They are all just rationalizations. If you are an egalitarian, you ought to donate most of your income to those significantly worse off than you, or to effective charities, or even to a government. Otherwise, you are a morally blameworthy hypocrite.

Here's an excerpt:

As more general point, the “drop in the ocean” argument looks extremely implausible when applied to virtually any issue of justice other than distributive justice. Suppose that Bess is running her business within a basic framework that permits discriminatory hiring practices. She reckons that it is morally permissible for her to discriminate against applicants based on their race because any decision of hers to not discriminate wouldn’t make a dent in the larger social problem of racial discrimination. Clearly, Bess is in the wrong. Even if her decision to act unjustly toward particular people is a “drop in the ocean,” she still ought not act unjustly

 

Indeed, Rawls himself seems to agree with us here. For instance, he says universities cannot engage in racial discrimination, churches cannot burn heretics, parents cannot deprive their children of medical care, and parents should ensure that the burdens of raising children do not fall disproportionately on women. In these and other cases, Rawls says that principles of justice directly control individual behavior in markets and civil society, not merely what the laws should say about individual behavior. Presumably, if a society had no laws forbidding such behaviors—if it allowed churches to burn heretics—Rawls would not merely say the basic structure is unjust. He would likely say that it would still be unjust for individual priests to burn heretics. Further, Rawls is not saying these cases are wrong because they violate other principles of justice beyond those constituting justice as fairness; he says these behaviors violate justice as fairness.

 

To bring the argument back to distributive justice in particular, consider a thought experiment. Imagine a party brings together a large number of people. It could be great-grandma hosting her 100 great-grandchildren, none of whom have met each other before. Or imagine a new business has an opening day party. 

 

Suppose a giant pie will be sliced and distributed to the partygoers. Imagine the person cutting and handing out slices does what he admits is a bad job—some slices are huge and others tiny. 100 uneven slices are handed out. 98 of the 100 attendees immediately eat their slices, leaving just you with your giant slice and Mary with a tiny slice. She says, “Wow, the slices are so uneven. Might you share some of yours with me?” 

 

It seems absurd for you to say, “Well, since everyone else has already eaten their slices, there’s no way for me to rectify the overall unjust distribution. Even if I share my pie and we both get equal slices, the overall distribution will remain unjust. So, I might as well eat my big slice while you nibble on your tiny slice.”

 

It’s true that sharing with Mary won't fix the overall distribution. But that doesn’t appear to justify your refusal to share with Mary. Even if we modify the thought experiment, imagining that there are 1,000, 10,000, or a million other pie eaters, and once again, everyone quickly eats their pie except you and Mary, it still seems reasonable for Mary to demand you share with her and unreasonable for you to refuse on the grounds that it won’t fix the problem.

 

Note that in this thought experiment, we are not even supposing that Mary is very hungry or needy, or that she will starve unless she gets enough pie. What’s doing the work here is the thought that the distribution of pie is unfair, not principles of beneficence or charity.

Moral Philosophy's Moral Risk: Should You Deplatform Yourself?

 

Chris Freiman's and my paper “Moral Philosophy’s Moral Risk” is out on early view at Ratio today.

Here’s the summary from the conclusion: 

 

There is a very good chance that your moral theory gets something seriously wrong—your views may amount to a defense of oppression, dehumanization, or genocide. If you accept the commonsense position that it is wrong to believe and advocate morally heinous ideas, then moral theorists should not take the sorts of risks they are accustomed to taking.  We should instead confine ourselves to offering only safe, narrow, and conservative arguments that are unlikely to be too far off track. You may find this alternative deflating—and frankly, a bit boring—but perhaps this is simply the price of honoring our doxastic and expressive duties.

 

On the other hand, you might think that moral theorists need to be able to take risks to properly do their job. After all, ours is a discipline that entertains the notion that getting an abortion is as morally trivial as getting a haircut and that human extinction could be a good thing. It would be a serious loss if these kinds of arguments vanished from the pages of ethics journals and books. This view would count in favor of granting moral theorists a special moral license to engage in morally risky behavior—a license that in turn forbids attempts to ‘deplatform’ McMahan, Singer, Stock, and others.

 

We take no stand on how to resolve this dilemma. We insist only that moral theorizing is more ethically fraught than it appears and that moral theorists need to reckon with the moral risks of doing their job. 

 

We start by noting that most people believe thought is not a morality-free zone. Instead, commonsense ethics holds it can be wrong to advocate, believe, or in many cases even serious contemplate the serious possibility that certain ideas might be true. For example, my friends owe it to me not to contemplate the serious possibility that I might be trying to murder them.

But if so, this leads to a problem: Moral philosophers are at near constant risk of contemplating, advocating, defending, and believing heinous things. Part of the problem is that philosophers work on hard problems where it is likely they will get the wrong answer. Part of the problem is that the public culture of philosophy is unlikely to overcome our epistemic biases. And there’s more.

Here’s an excerpt. But do download and read the whole thing--an excerpt doesn't do it justice:

For instance, consider again the question or what conditions are necessary and sufficient for sexual consent. Imagine, for simplicity’s sake, these conditions fall on a one-dimensional scale from fully consensual on the left to horrifically nonconsensual on the right. Imagine the correct place to draw the divide is at point C. If you draw the line to right of C, then a moral critic might condemn you, saying you defending de re, if not de dicto, the permissibility of actions that in fact constitute rape. You might have a clever argument to the contrary, but in fact, the action you defend is sexual assault. You just spent a few months seriously contemplating that a form of sexual assault might be permissible (though you did not describe it that way). However, it goes the other way, too. If you draw the line to the left of C, then a critic might condemn your behavior as not merely mistaken but morally wrongful. After all, but calling a consensual case non-consensual, you thereby infantilize adults and deny their agency over their own bodies. Either way, you could plausibly be accused of violating doxastic, contemplative, or expressive duties. 

 

This critic might not be persuaded if you say you genuinely believe the actions are right, and you are not condoning what you yourself would call (de dicto) rape or infantilization/denial of agency. After all, in many other cases, we condemn people even when they do not describe their beliefs that way. For instance, many racists sincerely deny they are racist, but we condemn them because they are in fact racist. Similarly, many pedophiles (e.g., NAMBLA members) believe de dicto that children can consent to sex with adults, and so believe de dicto that sex with children need not be rape. Nevertheless, most condemn them for holding those beliefs. So, it seems, merely having certain de dicto beliefs (such as ‘Sex with minors is consensual, autonomous, and permissible’) does not save one from moral wrongness.

 

Or consider the question of when we must accept others’ testimony. Draw the line too far to one side, and you thereby commit epistemic injustice against those who testify. Draw it too far the other way, you thereby commit epistemic injustice against those who listen. Either way, you belittle someone’s epistemic capacity, either by wrongly demanding they submit to what they have the right to reject or wrongly authorizing them to reject what they should accept.

 

This point generalizes. During moral inquiry, we at high risk of giving incorrect answers to momentous questions. Consider:

·      If the pro-choice position is wrong, then it looks like many philosophers defend what has been, in effect, genocide. 

·      If the doing/allowing distinction is not viable, then many philosophers have rationalized and defended the moral equivalent of murder.

·      If philosophers’ defense of atheism is incorrect, the effects could be catastrophically harmful for eternity, and they have also violated their duty to acknowledge and love God.

·      If Marxism is correct, then the typical Rawlsian or egalitarian social democrat ends up advocating and rationalizing rights violations from capitalist firms aided by the social democratic state.

·      If libertarianism is correct, then the typical Marxist, centrist, Rawlsian, or other person ends up advocating and rationalizing frequent rights violations by the modern state.

·      If it is wrong to kill and eat animals, then factory farming is a moral catastrophe, and advocating the permissibility of meat eating is endorsement of a catastrophic moral horror.

·      If the doctrine of double effect is wrong, then many bioethicists and just war theorists have been rationalizing what is in fact murder.

·      If communitarianism is correct, many liberal philosophers are rationalizing social systems which undermine people’s happiness and interpersonal connections.

·      If the open borders position is correct, then many philosophers are rationalizing what amounts to a severe systematic rights deprivation, and severe harm, to the world’s poor. Since the harms of closed borders fall disproportionately on non-whites, their position amounts to systematic racism.