Justice and Sustainable development - theory and practice

Substantive Justice III
Substantive Justice III

1. Rawls's aims
1. Rawls's aims
 Rawls tells us that he has two aims.
 One is to articulate a small set of general
principles of justice which underlie and
account for our various convictions or strong
intuitions about questions of justice.
 The second aim of Rawls' book is to develop a
theory which is superior to utilitarianism as a
theory of social justice.

2. The primary subject of justice
2. The primary subject of justice
 Rawls concentrates on what he takes to be the
primary subject of justice: the basic structure of
society.
 By the basic structure of society Rawls means
the entire set of major social, political, legal and
economic institutions.
 The reason for focusing on the basic structure of
society is that in reality, there are deep
inequalities of power and opportunity in the
basic institutions of society which exert a very
profound influence on individuals' life prospects.

 The principles of justice would specify how the
basic structure is to distribute prospects of
obtaining what Rawls calls primary.
 Primary goods are those things that every rational
man would want, whatever a person's rational plan
of life.
 Two categories:
 1. Social primary goods: rights and liberties,
power and opportunities, income and wealth, and
self-respect.
 2. Natural primary goods: health, intelligence and
imagination.

3. Rawls's two principles as a solution to the
3. Rawls's two principles as a solution to the
primary problem of justice
primary problem of justice
Rawls proposes and defends the following two
principles:
First Principle
 Each person is to have an equal right to the
most extensive total system of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar system of
liberty for all.
 (the Principle of Greatest Equal Liberty, or
simply the Liberty Principle)

Second principle: (See p.83)
 Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged
so that they are both:
 (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged,
and (the Difference Principle)
 (b) attached to offices and positions open to all
under conditions of fair equality of opportunity
(the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle)
 The priorities of justice are in the following lexical
order: the liberty principle, the fair equality of
opportunity principle, and the difference principle.

 The difference principle: two key phrases
must be interpreted: "social and economic
inequalities" refer to primary social goods:
wealth, income, power and opportunity.
 "Least advantaged" refers to those persons
who have the lowest prospects of gaining these
goods.
 But Rawls is quick to proceed to restate the
notion as the representative worst-off man in
terms of income. (See Section 15, esp. p.94)

 There is an important feature of the different
principle which needs to be noted.
 It is its maximizing logic: the best just
scheme is such that the expected benefits of
the least advantaged are maximized; no
changes in the expected benefits of those
better off can improve the worse off. (See
pp.78-79)

Expected benefits of
the better off
the better off
3
3
7
7
12
12
15
15
just
just
best just
best just
unjust
unjust
the worse off
the worse off
3
3
5
5
7
7
7
7
• The difference principle is a priority
principle giving absolute priority to
the worst off.

4. Intuitive arguments for the difference principle
4. Intuitive arguments for the difference principle
4.1. The social cooperation argument
 The difference principle holds that the better off can
gain more only if that would improve the prospects of
the worst off.
 Now from the view point of the worst off, they would
have no complaint about this inequality, since that
would improve their prospects.
 But we may ask: Why should the better off have no
complaint?
 Rawls recognizes that this needs a reply, and he gives
one.

 The difficulty is to show that A [the better endowed]
has no grounds for complaint.
 Perhaps he is required to have less than he might have
since his having more would result in some loss to B
[the worse endowed].
 Now what can be said to the more favored man?

4.2. From the social cooperation argument to
4.2. From the social cooperation argument to
the common asset argument
the common asset argument
 The basis of this conception lies not in a
particular bias in favor of the less
advantaged but in the idea that economic
institutions are reciprocal arrangements
for mutual advantage in which the parties
cooperate on a footing of equality.
 Their cooperation enterprise may be more or
less efficient depending on the talents of the
members and how fully these are developed.

 But since the value of these talents is some
thing that is realized only in cooperation the
benefits derived from these talents are see
n as a common product on which all have a
n equal claim.
 Thus Rawls says of his Two Principles that
they 'are equivalent ...to an undertaking to r
egard the distribution of natural abilities as
a collective asset so that the more fortunate
are to benefit only in ways that help those
who have lost out'(A Theory of Justice, p.10
1, 179).

 Reply: No doubt the use and development of
the better off's talents depend on the
cooperation of and contributions from others.
 But it does not imply that every one in the
cooperation contributes equally and should
therefore have an equal share of the fruits of
the better off's talents and efforts.
 Unequal contribution generates unequal
rewards.
 Thus it is difficult to see why the talents should
be regarded as common or collective assets of
society.

 Moreover, this argument cannot deal with
those who can contribute nothing to the
cooperation, e.g., seriously mentally retarded
people.
 Why should the assets of those better endowed
be commonly shared with them?
 The implications for environmental justice?

 Rawls says that since natural goods cannot be
directly under the control of the basic structure
of society, principles of social justice should
not require the basic structure to distribute
them.
 Rather, it distributes the social primary goods,
but in a way that helps to nullify the arbitrary
effects of natural distribution of talents.
5. Environmental Goods and Policy Impacts
5. Environmental Goods and Policy Impacts

 Consider what happens when a government enacts
some policy on environmental grounds. Very often it
will reduce people's liberty in some respects, or
transfer resources from private to public use.
 A policy to control the pollution caused by cars may
involve requiring people to use cleaner fuels, or more
radically to reduce their use of cars in one way or
another.
 Protecting an endangered species or an ecological
system will in nearly every case require public
expenditure, and this must either increase the tax
burden on individuals or be financed by cuts in other
welfare programs.

 We should not expect the impact of these
measures to be neutral across persons, for two
reasons: the cost will fall more heavily on
some people than on others, and the
environmental good will benefit some more
than others.
 If my job requires me to make frequent use of
a car, then restrictions on car use will be
correspondingly more burdensome than on
someone who rarely drives or has no car at all.

 Almost every environmental measure will hav
e distributive implications of this kind.
 Moreover it would be rash to assume that the i
mpact will be random, in the sense that people
will gain from one measure but lose from the n
ext, so that overall the distribution of benefits
and burdens will be unaffected.
 We cannot say a priori whether the redistributi
ve impact will favour the better-off or the wors
e-off.

 It is sometimes taken for granted that the costs of
environmental degradation are borne mainly by the
poor, because inequalities in political power mean, for
example, that polluting factories and other such hazards
get sited close to lower-class residential areas.
 On the other hand in the case of environmental goods
that are provided equally to everyone (such as the
preservation of animal species or ecosystems), standard
economic analysis leads us to expect that the rich will
gain more from their provision than the poor, so that
unless the tax regime that funds these policies is
strongly progressive, their net impact is likely to be
regressive.

 So it seems that we cannot after all place
environmental goods outside the scope of our
theories of justice. We should regard them as
potential benefits, often accompanied by
restrictions, that need to go into the
distributive calculus alongside goods like
opportunity, income, and wealth.

 Rawls makes the familiar point that because of free-ri
der problems such goods cannot be supplied through
economic markets, and must therefore be provided dir
ectly by the state. In his discussion of the branches of
government he charges the ‘allocation branch’ with c
orrecting for externalities by the use (p. 157 ) of suita
ble taxes and subsidies, and among the cases he has i
n mind here is that of an industry which imposes cost
s on others by polluting emissions.
 So we can say that in certain well-defined cases Rawl
sian justice would include environmental measures to
ensure that individuals did not disturb the fair balance
of benefits and burdens by imposing costs like polluti
on on others or by free-riding on public goods.

 But Rawls asks finally whether it might not be
legitimate for citizens to make further public
expenditures beyond those required by justice
as so far defined, which would presumably
embrace such things as preserving and/or
increasing access to areas of natural beauty,
safeguarding endangered species, and so forth.

 Rawls’s answer is that such expenditures must
be unanimously agreed upon by the citizens,
which means that the costs must be so
distributed that everyone gains on balance
from the expenditure.
 Environmental values are treated as
preferences which may be pursued only within
the limits set by the primary scheme of
distribution that justice requires.

 We can sum up by saying that environmental goods
may enter the theory of justice at three points.
 First, those features of the environment that are really
essential to a sustainable human existence—like breat
hable air—have first claim on resources in the same
way as, say, national defence. If principles of justice a
re there to guide us in distributing the fruits of social
cooperation, then anything that counts as a necessary
precondition of any cooperation at all should be seen
as lexically prior to more specific distributive principl
es.But this only applies to a few very basic environme
ntal goods.

 Second, the creation of environmental goods a
nd bads may disturb the fair assignment of res
ources or other primary goods, as when the pol
lution you generate lowers the value of my lan
d, and here justice supports environmental poli
cies as the most effective way of controlling su
ch external effects. Again this is limited to tho
se features of the environment that have a tang
ible impact on the distribution of (p. 160 ) pri
mary goods to individuals.

 Finally people may simply value environmental
goods even though these neither count as essentials of
human existence nor affect their share of primary
goods—for instance, they may value the continued
existence of the snail darter.
 Such valuations are regarded by the liberal theory as
preferences which should count equally (but no more
than equally) when political decisions are taken.

 This suggests amending the theory of justice so that
environmental goods can be counted as primary
goods alongside the remainder of the list. The basic
structure should be seen as providing people not only
with liberties, opportunities, and wealth, but with an
environment whose features they value positively.
 Although the environmental goods are not (normally)
assigned to particular individuals, nevertheless in
reckoning each individual's share of social resources
we should include the environmental goods to which
he or she attaches value. But this immediately raises
the question of how the value of environmental goods
is to be computed.

6. Cost benefit analysis
6. Cost benefit analysis
 Why might one reject cost-benefit analysis as a way o
f establishing the value of environmental goods?
 One reason would be that if we try to discover how m
uch income people are prepared to give up to have an
environmental good—either by asking them or observ
ing their behaviour when they (p. 162 ) have to make
a choice—we will end up valuing the environmental
good on too narrow a basis, that is in terms of the use
value people derive from its existence.

 This charge is quite convincingly rebutted by writers
like David Pearce, who point out that environmental
value ought to be seen as a composite of
 i. actual use value;
 ii. option value (the value people attach to the
possibility of using or enjoying some environmental
resource like unspoiled countryside even though they
are not now doing so);
 iii. existence value (the value people attach to the
continued existence of a species or a habitat, for
example, even though they have no intention of
observing or visiting it).
 Whatever method is used to measure costs and
benefits ought to be designed to capture all three
sources of value.

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