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Equality and Liberty As Complements

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Equality and Liberty As Complements Hoover Press : Machan (Equality) DP5 HPEQUA0400 05-06-01 rev1 page 97 Equality and Liberty as Complements Mark LeBar and liberty are twin pillars of modern democratic attitudes. We believe they underwrite our commit- ments to our cherished political institutions and our relations among ourselves as citizens. Yet it is not so obvious that these pillars stand together. In a perfectly free world, some of us would no doubt fare well whereas others would not. Even if we begin with equal amounts of wealth, given the differences in our abilities and enterprise, the freedom to do what we wish with it will threaten that equality. And a world in which each of us was assured a roughly equal degree of material welfare would require massive constraints on our liberty. The broken promises of twentieth-cen- tury socialism suggest that if equality is used to justify political insti- tutions, liberty is quickly extinguished. Is it then right to see equality and liberty as in tension with each other? If we want to avoid that conclusion, we might begin by suspecting that we have got hold of the wrong conceptions of either liberty or equality, or both. Perhaps material equality is not the form of equality that is of greatest moral and political value. Perhaps, on the other hand, the freedom to do what you wish with Hoover Press : Machan (Equality) DP5 HPEQUA0400 05-06-01 rev1 page 98 98 / Mark LeBar what you have is not the most important notion of liberty. The right conceptions of both ideals might eliminate the tension be- tween them. So I will suggest in this chapter. But what conceptions are the right ones? In what follows I sur- vey some of the candidates that philosophers and theorists have offered in the brief history of modern democracy. That history is littered with problematic conceptions of equality and liberty. I will suggest that the most promising approach (though one in need of much development itself ) is one proposed by Immanuel Kant—a revered figure in moral philosophy, but unjustly overlooked as a source of political insight. Equality figures greatly in our understanding of what is politically sacrosanct. The Declaration of Independence takes as a “self-evi- dent” truth that “all men are created equal,” and in doing so it lays claim to an ideal that we have tried valiantly to realize. But in what way are we equal? What kind of equality should matter for political institutions? It patently cannot be equality of any sort of natural attribute. There is simply no denying that we differ from each other in more ways than we can count, but these differences do not affect our conviction that we are equal in some important sense. Equality must be a normative, not a descriptive, ideal; it must be a matter not of what we are like, but rather of how we ought to treat each other. The claim of the Declaration of Independence is that people should be treated as equals, not that people are equal in any biolog- ical sense. But what does it mean to treat people as equals? How are polit- ical institutions capable of reflecting or embodying such an ideal? These are the questions that advocates of the ideal of material equality of various sorts—egalitarians—themselves disagree about. Hoover Press : Machan (Equality) DP5 HPEQUA0400 05-06-01 rev1 page 99 Equality and Liberty as Complements /99 Equality of Welfare We might begin with the idea that treating people as equals means ensuring that, by and large, they live equally well, or have equally valuable or desirable lives. Some, indeed, have argued that political institutions ought to be arranged to ensure equality of welfare or equality of condition. We can appreciate the motivation for this idea by recognizing the role of brute luck in how desirable our lives are. My life is a much better one, given the time and circumstances of my birth and the parents to whom I was born, than it would have been had I been born a century before, or born into severe poverty. In one important sense it is just my luck that I was not. And there is something attractive about the idea that one job for human beings in community—in particular as part of their political organization—should be to minimize these unfair results of nature’s crapshoot. As John Rawls, a prominent proponent of one form of egalitarianism, puts the point, a just society is one in which “men agree to share one another’s fate”1 by attempting to counteract the arbitrary natural distribution of advantages and disadvantages in our institutions. And one way to do this is to distribute the goods we produce so as to equalize the conditions in which we live our lives. The aim is to ensure that all of us live roughly equally well. Plausible as this proposal sounds initially, it confronts two signif- icant problems. First, such a proposal must include an account of how such welfare or well-being is to be measured, if we are to equalize it. This is a sizable problem. Is there some objective list of things we can check off and sum up for each person to arrive at a measurement of how well each is living? What would go on such a list, and who decides that? Consider a good as fungible as financial wealth. If we were to equalize the wealth of Bill Gates and the 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Hoover Press : Machan (Equality) DP5 HPEQUA0400 05-06-01 rev1 page 100 100 / Mark LeBar Dalai Lama, would that make them equally well off? By whose standards? It seems doubtful that financial wealth matters to each of them in the same way. In general, it is hard to imagine any objec- tive list of things to measure the desirability of lives that would command consensus. Though there are certainly broad areas of convergence (most of us would rather have more money than less), there is also great difference among the standards we use to judge how well our lives are going. One way of avoiding that problem is this: instead of equalizing people’s holdings in some fixed list of good things (which people may or may not value, or value to differing degrees), focus instead on equalizing the degree to which they have what they do value— the degree to which their own preferences are satisfied. Given this interpretation of equality of welfare, it does not matter that Bill Gates and the Dalai Lama do not have the same amount of money. What matters is that each has what he wants to a roughly equal degree, though what that is for each is very different. But this approach too has its drawbacks. What if what I want is prohibitively costly? What if I can be happy only if I have uninter- rupted opportunity to gaze on original Renoirs and will be deeply unhappy otherwise? Does a commitment to equality require that I be ensured uninterrupted access to the paintings? What if my pref- erence is something less bizarre but more perverse, such as the reinstitution of slavery? Is there the slightest reason for our political system to be designed so that I get equal satisfaction of that prefer- ence? Presumably not. Clearly not just any preference I have should count for purposes of measuring my well-being, and thus for equal- izing my well-being with that of my fellow citizens. Moreover, my claims to the satisfaction of my preferences are even weaker if I have deliberately cultivated those preferences. If they are my doing (so to speak), the fact that I could have cultivated other, less costly or less perverse, preferences further undermines my claim on society for their satisfaction. This brings us to the Hoover Press : Machan (Equality) DP5 HPEQUA0400 05-06-01 rev1 page 101 Equality and Liberty as Complements / 101 second serious problem for equality of welfare of which I spoke earlier, and egalitarians differ deeply as to how to deal with it. Whether and how our responsibility for our preferences matters is a specific case of a more general worry: how are we to reconcile equality of welfare with the idea that each of us must be thought to bear (some) responsibility for how well our lives go? We are not just victims of fate with respect to our well-being. We are agents who act to make our lives better or worse, and we hold each other accountable for much of how well we live. These facts matter for our thinking about equality. For example, suppose we think that society ought to be ordered so that each person fares equally well (by some metric or other) in their lives, and we distribute goods accordingly. But someone, call him Burt, loves to gamble. Unfortunately (for Burt) he is not good at it, and consequently he loses money as fast as he can get his hands on it. If we attempt to give him more money for food, clothing, housing, and so on to bring his welfare up to a level of equality with others, he will just lose it gambling. Does a commitment to equality require that we keep funneling money to Burt in an effort to maintain his level of welfare at par with the welfare of others? Equality of Resources Proponents of egalitarianism deal in different ways with the idea that we bear some responsibility for our own well-being. One way is to insist that, instead of aiming for equality of welfare as an out- come, political institutions should provide for equality of resources, leaving individuals to bear the responsibility for how they deploy those resources and consequently for what level of well-being they achieve.2 2.
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