Fairness to non-participants: a case for a practice-independent egalitarian baseline

Abstract

Proponents of practice-dependent egalitarianism argue that egalitarian duties and entitlements only apply among participants in morally relevant practices. In this paper, I argue that these views are implausible because they allow for objectionable treatment of non-participants. I show that it is impossible, on the basis of practice-internal considerations alone, to determine the extent to which the pursuit of practices can permissibly limit the opportunities of non-participants. There are opportunities beyond the current holdings of practices to which no one has a privileged claim (such as unowned natural resources), and the distribution of which is a matter of justice. A just distribution of such unowned distributive goods, though, requires a practice-independent distributive baseline. I further show that such a baseline can only be egalitarian because all alternative baselines face serious objections. From this I conclude that any plausible theory of distributive justice must accept some form of equal practice-independent distributive entitlements.

Keywords:

• global egalitarianism
• practice-independent
• distributive justice

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Andrew Williams and Jerry Gaus for their support and feedback, as well as to Chris Armstrong, Darrel Moellendorf, Andres Moles, and the anonymous reviewer of CRISPP for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the doctorate from which this paper evolved.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By the term ‘justice’ I mean the particularly stringent and forceful moral obligations of social institutions that differ from other moral requirements applicable to institutions (such as, for instance, charity and humanitarian assistance) in two ways. Firstly, we have duties of justice because there are persons who have correlative enforceable entitlements that trigger these duties. Secondly, failure to respect these entitlements by not fulfilling duties of justice can have severe consequences for an institution – it might jeopardize its own moral justification for exercising political power. This also means that states can endanger their legitimacy when they treat non-members in unjustifiable ways (see, for instance, Pogge 2005, Buchanan 2011).

2. See, for example, the works of James (2005a, 2005b, 2011, 2012), Sangiovanni (2007, 2008), Ronzoni (2009), Banai et al. (2011), and Valentini (2011a, 2011b).

3. In this paper, I focus especially on natural resources since these (a) are not socially produced benefits, (b) are objectively valuable for everyone, and (c) affect all metrics of distributive justice.

4. The question whether practice-independent egalitarianism is relational or non-relational has important implications, but is not relevant for my argument. The distinction between relational and non-relational views is not consistently applied within the literature. Many authors (see Sangiovanni 2007, pp. 5–6, Valentini 2011a, p. 6) understand as ‘relational’ views that hold that distributive justice applies among people who engage in direct interactions of some sort with each other (e.g. within states or international trade relations). Others (see Abizadeh 2007, p. 331, Armstrong 2012, p. 26) hold that relationalism includes all views that claim that distributive justice applies to all persons who have access to the same pool of resources – irrespectively of whether they interact. An interesting question related to this distinction is whether distributive justice applies in situations in which there is no way in which our actions could lead to a loss of opportunities for others because the latter could never access the same distributive goods that we can make use of (e.g. because they lived in the past or in a different galaxy). For theorists that answer this question affirmatively (who generally qualify as non-relationalists), the fact that some are worse-off (but not made worse-off by anything we do) is a case of (cosmic) distributive injustice. While this question is important and regards which states of affairs are relevant for justice (i.e. only those that can bear the mark of human influence, or any state of affairs that exists at all), it does not detract from the main arguments I advance in this paper: that egalitarian claims of justice do not depend upon membership in any particular social practices, and that ensuring that a certain state of affairs obtains (that no one uses more than an equal share of the overall available opportunities to those things that can make a human life go well) is a matter of (distributive) justice.

5. Besides the mentioned practice-dependent egalitarians, there is another large group of authors who restricts egalitarian justice to comembers in social practices (see Rawls 1999, Blake 2002, Nagel 2005, Freeman 2006, Moellendorf 2009, Tan 2012). On these views, though, the scope of equality is restricted to practices because equality presupposes some particular feature in practices that triggers the egalitarian requirements (e.g. the fact that their members are coerced by a common authority, or that the members are all contributors to the production of some common good). The problem of the unfair treatment of non-participants raised in this paper presents a condemning problem for both groups of membership-dependent egalitarians. What they have in common – and what gives rise to their common problem – is the claim that membership in certain social practices is a necessary and sufficient condition for having egalitarian claims and duties. However, the shortcomings of this second group of membership-dependent egalitarianism (that focus on particular features of practices rather than their purposes) have been well rehearsed (see, i.e. Julius (2006), or Cohen and Sabel (2006); and the works of the practice-dependent egalitarians listed in footnote 2). Thus, in this paper I focus on practice-dependent egalitarians who argue that whether justice requires distributive equality depends on the social meaning of existing practices. I thank a reviewer of CRISPP for pressing me to make this difference clearer.

6. Elsewhere, James argues that ‘the significance of distribution […] lies not in what distributional patterns come about per se, but in independently valuable relations of recognition’ (James 2011, p. 276). Miriam Ronzoni holds that ‘no state of affairs can be judged just or unjust unless we refer to a specific practice within it’ (Ronzoni 2009, p. 233). Darrel Moellendorf rejects the idea ‘that equality is intrinsically valuable.’ In his view, justice is ‘concerned not with conditions of inequality independent of economic associations, but with whether economic institutions […] confer advantages simply on the basis of inequalities of social fortune’ (Moellendorf 2009, pp. 5, 63).

7. ‘Social justice assessment is limited to socially created advantages and disadvantages’ (James 2005a, p. 554). The idea that socially produced inequalities are morally more important than those coming about naturally is shared and argued for by Nagel in his article ‘Justice and Nature’ (Nagel 1997).

8. By ‘morally arbitrary’ I mean factors that are not reasons for anything else.

9. James groups the Principle of Due Care with other non-distributive duties he mentions, such as inclusion or assistance (see James 2005a, p. 543).

10. Assuming that utilizing the resources of island Q is a feasible alternative for society P to the practice that pollutes society R’s shores.

11. For Immanuel Kant, this issue constitutes the fundamental problem for the justification of private property in his ‘Doctrine of Right’ (see Kant 1996).

12. As is well known, the second explanation that Locke offers for the permissibility of private property is that such ownership is justifiable when we leave ‘as much and as good’ for others (see Locke 1980, chapter 5, §27). This justification, though, presupposes the acceptance of the very baseline that practice-dependent theorists want to reject: an egalitarian practice-independent constraint on the pursuit of all practices.

13. Rawls’s duty of assistance (Rawls 1999, p. 106) that aims at guaranteeing just and decent institutions for everyone is one example of such a global sufficientarian view.

14. For an argument that high thresholds of sufficiency are problematic in this way see Christiano (2008a, p. 29).

15. For this point see also Christiano (2008b).

16. We might accept the claim that keeping people from establishing common practices while coming into direct contact with them (for instance, by building border fences) already constitutes a form of interaction that makes considerations of practice-dependent (and possibly egalitarian) justice applicable. However, in the scenario I consider here, such direct interaction does not take place.

17. This leaves open the possibility that, if prioritarianism is correct, this equal practice-independent concern for people’s distributive entitlements has to result in giving priority to the claims of those who are worst-off. The crucial point here is that also such prioritarian concern would have to apply in a practice-independent way to everyone. I thank Andres Moles for pointing this out to me.

18. It should be noted, though, that the argument advanced in this essay does not necessarily lead to a demand for equal shares of natural resources. Instead, it also allows for the possibility to argue for a distribution that requires equal shares of benefits that derive from the entire range of relevant goods as suggested by Caney (2012) and Armstrong (2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative Orders’ at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.