The Condition of Material Adequacy Classical Liberals

CONSTITUTIONAL CAPITALISM: Economic Freedom, Social Justice and the Myth of Modern Liberalism John Tomasi Working draft: please do not quote. Chapter 4: The Condition of Material Adequacy Classical liberals should accept social justice as concept. But what particular conception of social justice should classical liberals affirm? In this chapter, I gather materials to answer this question. With varying degrees of self-consciousness, most every major thinker in the classical liberal tradition affirms some version of what I call the condition of material adequacy. According to this condition, a liberals can advocate the classical liberal institutions of limited government and wide economic liberty only if, in light of a broad-gauged evaluation of the historical and economic realities of the society in question, they believe those institutions are likely to generate an adequate material and social outcome for all citizens. Towards what state of affairs must the provision of the material goods be adequate if, according to classical liberals, the condition 1 of material adequacy is to be satisfied? There are probably as many ways to answer that question as there are classical liberals. I shall suggest, though, that one way is morally most attractive when we consider that question at the level of regime-advocacy that I call political theory. It is this: classical liberal institutions can be advocated only if those institutions are deemed likely to generate social conditions within which citizens might develop the powers they have as free and equal citizens. That is, classical liberal institutions should be advocated only if they are deemed likely to help secure a thickly substantive conception of liberal social justice. 1 Of course, showing that classical liberals care about the material well-being of citizens is different from showing that classical liberals are committed to social justice. After all, classical liberals can have some concern about material well-being without agreeing with modern liberals about what the precise shape of those desired outcomes should be. Further, even if classical liberals did share with modern liberals a common understanding of what material outcomes were desired, this would not mean that classical liberals have the same reasons as modern liberals for caring about those outcomes. 2 These are important points and we will need to address them anon. For now, though, I emphasize that my purposes in chapter are not primarily historical or exegetical. By describing the expressions of concern in the classical liberal tradition about the material well- being of citizens, I am not attempting to show that classical liberal thinkers ever actually did or do now, secretly, affirm social justice. [I am not seeking with this book to do for classical liberalism what Dan Brown sought to do for/to Catholicism with The DaVinci Code.] Many of the historical figures I discuss were writing before social or distributive justice, at least in its modern sense, had been developed as a concept. Further, as we saw in the previous chapter, recent classical liberals who are aware of social justice strongly reject that ideal. So, as I have said, I am here merely assembling some raw materials. In the next chapter, I shall then use those materials to develop a particular conception of social justice that I say classical liberals should affirm. 1. Material Egalitarians Here… Modern liberals affirm a substantive conception of equality.2 A concern for substantive equality is not only a standard feature of 3 modern “democratic” liberalism. More, modern liberals claim that a concern for substantive equality is the defining feature of their view, the feature that distinguishes the modern, social democratic tradition from that of liberalism in its classical, capitalistic form.3 However, within the texts of thinkers in the classical liberal tradition, we consistently find expressions of concern about patterns of material outcomes. Sometimes classical liberals express their concern for citizen’s material holdings in relational terms, as when they say members of a society based on the liberal principles they recommend will have greater material wealth than will members of non-liberal societies. Other times, they express their concern for citizen’s level of material holdings in absolute terms, as when they claim that their preferred system of governance will result in citizens having sufficient material holdings to make their liberties valuable at all. Still other times, they express their concern for material well-being in relative terms, as when they say that the outcome of the instantiation of the political principles they recommend will be some desirable boundary of inequality in the holdings of the least and the most well off members of society. Thinkers in the classical liberal tradition often do not make clear what role they see these expressions of concern about material 4 well-being playing. Sometimes we find expressions of concern about material well-being peeking out of the interstices of the theories of writers in this tradition. In this mode, these expressions of concern are presented in an off-hand, by-the-way manner. If these hoped-for positive material outcomes are mentioned, they seem to play the role of buttresses to the main arguments being laid out in support of classical liberal institutions. Other times, we find classical liberals invoking these considerations about citizen’s material holdings in ways that are straightforwardly justificatory. That is, they rely on the claims they make about the material consequences of their preferred institutional regime as a way to justify that sort of regime itself. Despite these variations, though, thinkers in the classical liberal tradition show a consistent and manifest concern for the material well being of all citizens. This is true of recent defenders of classical liberalism. It is true of some of liberalism’s earliest defenders too. For John Locke, famously, the great end of government was the securing of people’s right to property. Locke also believed that inequalities in material holdings could be justified by the different degrees of industry of self-owning persons. But from the earliest stages of his argument, Locke demonstrates his commitment to the principle that material inequalities should not be unbounded. 5 Before the state, the prohibition on spoilage and the requirement of labor, provided caps on the degrees of material inequality that are morally permissible in Locke’s theory. These are natural, god- given constraints that could have been abscent: if God had created fruit so that it never spoiled, for example, the spoilage condition would not limit inequalities. But Locke’s discussion does more than merely present the inequality-limiting spoilage condition as a fact. He describes the effect of the operation of the spoilage condition as in an approving way, as though it seemed obvious to him that patterns of unequal material holdings, however they were arrived at, stood in need of some additional form of justification. After the formation of the state, Locke’s interest in patterns of holdings, and not just procedures, becomes even more apparent. Locke says that the state’s protection of property rights encourages the productive possibilities of human creativity, since “labor puts the difference of value of on everything.”4 Locke says that an effect of the operation of his property-protecting political scheme is that, because of it, even the poorest will do well. Thus, “a day labourer in England,” Locke tells us, “feeds, lodges and is clad” better than a king in a America—that is, a (naturally bountiful) place where this system is not fully in place (II, s.41). 6 But this is proto-Rawls. The “day labourer” in 17 Century England was indeed “the representative member of the least well-off class.” Locke is taking care to point out that even the least well off will fare better in this system than in other systems. The system of formal equality, with primacy given to the protection of individual rights to property, is the rational outcome of reasoning under maximin. After all, what if the class of day labourers were not made better off under Locke’s preferred scheme? What if they grew steadily and precipitously worse off? Would Locke just say too bad—natural rights are natural rights and issues of material equality are mere sidebar niceties? In a world where the facts on the ground were such that that growing inequality (rather than growing wealth) was the likely outcome of the state protection of property rights, would Locke expect his argument about the importance of property rights to convince anybody? I don’t think so. Locke’s sense of the importance of a positive material outcome for all citizens explains his need to carve out moral permissions in the cases where the expectation of well being is not realized. Thus, Locke writes, “common Charity teaches, that those should be most taken care of by the Law, who are least capable of taking care for 7 themselves.”5 Locke returns to this theme in an often quoted line from the First Treatise: “As Justice gives every Man a Title to the Product of his honest industry and the Fair acquisitions of his Ancestors…, so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from Extream want, were he has no means to subsist otherwise” (I, s.42).6 These concerns are all expressed in the natural law terms in which Locke seems to be recognizing something like an adequacy condition on the form of liberalism he advocates. This condition limns the commitment to social justice that we would later see in modern liberals. How much material inequality is too much, according to this adequacy condition? Locke’s early formulation leaves this ambiguous (though in this he is not so different even from many modern liberals).

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