Difference Makes No Difference in the Difference Principle
To reinforce the point that even Rawls’ difference principle isn’t really concerned with inequality at all, look at this excerpt from Leif Wenar’s SEP entry.
The second part of the second principle is the difference principle. The difference principle requires that social institutions be arranged so that inequalities of wealth and income work to the advantage of those who will be worst off. Starting from an imagined baseline of equality, a greater total product can be generated by allowing inequalities in wages and salaries: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle requires that inequalities which increase the total product be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to the greatest advantage of those advantaged least.
Consider four hypothetical economic structures A-D, and the lifetime-average levels of income these would produce for representative members of three different groups:
Economy Least-Advantaged Group Middle Group Most-Advantaged Group A 10,000 10,000 10,000 B 12,000 15,000 20,000 C 20,000 30,000 50,000 D 17,000 50,000 100,000 Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best. Inequalities in C are to everyone’s advantage relative to an equal division (Economy A), and a more equal division (Economy B). But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor (Economy D). The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline it requires inequalities that are good for all, and particularly for the worst-off.
Pay special attention to Wenar’s illustration with the chart. To correctly apply the rule you never have to look at the last two columns. That’s because they are irrelevant to the actual underlying principle obscured by the equality-centric language of the difference principle. (The last two columns are very relevant when we start thinking about the strains of commitment and stability in a dynamic context, but that’s a different issue.) The idea of inequality here is an idle conceptual gear that catches on nothing and does no intellectual work. Rawls’ real rule, cleared of distracting superfluities, seems to be: find the system that leaves the least-advantaged best off and pick it.
Rawlsians: what say you?
April 8th, 2008 12:40
You say: “The last two columns [on the right] are very relevant when we start thinking about the strains of commitment and stability in a dynamic context, but that’s a different issue.”
How is that another issue? Doesn’t that reinforce the weakness of the difference principle? If the vast proportion of the population in Economy D is in the Most-Advantaged group, while only a tiny minority is in the Least-Advantaged group, wouldn’t that make a difference in your judgment?
April 8th, 2008 13:49
Rue, I think a strict interpretation of the difference principle is silly. Indeed, I think the difference principle is silly, since difference is not what matters. But I think a non-rigid version of the intuition behind is is really sensible: a just social system will do well for the poor. Also, as a matter of fact, the wealthy don’t need to take much of a hit in order for the system to do well for the poor, so cases in which we take almost everything from the rich in the attempt to give the poor an extra penny just don’t come up. When you try that, you end up with Zimbabwe, which does not in fact benefit the poor in the end.
April 8th, 2008 14:47
Of course it’s silly, a procrustean bed if ever there was one. Not to mention that Rawls’s focus is on “groups” as if this is some kind of natural kind within an economy that can be meaningfully designated across time.
Anyhow, when it comes to our “intuitions” about how to cut the pie, there is no better essay than Parfit’s Lindley Lecture, called “Equality or Priority”.
Another well argued essay is Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, which I would guess your own view approaches. The general idea is that what’s morally important is not the relative differences in goods between people, but whether those worst off have enough.
April 8th, 2008 15:04
Both great papers. I am very close to Frankfurt’s view. He knows bullshit when he sees it.
April 8th, 2008 16:24
I’m no Rawlsian, but doesn’t the difference principle come into play if we have a new option (E) in which the worst off do equally well (20k), but the rich do even better (100k)? As I understand it, the difference principle tells us (absurdly) to reject this pareto superior option. Or have I misunderstood it?
April 8th, 2008 18:20
Richard: My impression is that the Difference Principle takes no position either way as to which of those scenarios is preferable.
It seems plausible that one could extend Rawlsian logic to produce some sort of tiebreaker (perhaps to consider the second-least-advantaged, then third-least-advantaged until you find one where there’s a difference, which would allow for Pareto Efficiency) but I don’t think the theory makes any particular statement either way.
April 8th, 2008 20:40
Hmm, the DP is often glossed as the claim that “inequalities are only justified if they are to the benefit of the worst off”. But maybe this is a mis-statement?
April 9th, 2008 20:09
The difference principle is a principle of justice only insofar as it would be chosen by free rational beings in the quasi-noumenal original position. “Thus men exhibit their freedom, their independence from the contingencies of nature and society, by acting in ways they would acknowledge in the original position”(255-6). If chosen in the original position, the principles of justice have the status of categorical imperatives without all the arbitrariness problems of Kantian transcendence. This “simply reflects the fact that no contingencies appear as premises in their derivation.”
As Michael Sandel points out, the original position is an “empirical” effort to hit the bulls-eye between Kant’s radically removed subject, and the radically situated subject of unreflective experience. To rise above the muck of contingency Rawls abstracts away all “morally irrelevant” circumstances and desiderata; to then stay tethered to the ground Rawls stops the abstraction when all remaining contingencies are global — i.e., the remaining atmosphere of assumptions is “thin” enough to apply to all humans beings. Thus, when Rawls writes that the “fundamental principles of justice quite properly depend upon the natural facts about men in society” (159), or that “moral philosophy must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts” (51), he explicitly concedes that principles of justice, whatever they might be, are those principles which would be unanimously chosen by Human Beings, however idealized, were they to individually and freely contract into a social arrangement in a state of pure equality (behind the veil).
Thus, what has been left on the table is the possibility of Rawls’ stated principles being undermined by new empirical facts about universal human nature. As he himself admits, “None of [the difficulties in theoretically defining ideal beings] affects the contention that in the original position rational persons so characterized would make a certain decision…Thus, to say that the principles of justice would be adopted is to say how these persons would decide being moved in ways our account describes.” In other words, if we were somehow lucky enough to be invited to take minutes during a contracting session in the original position, the foundational principles our subjects did in fact decide to unanimously adopt are, by definition, the substantive principles of justice Rawls is looking for.
I say this because there has been a set of very interesting experiments indicating that the difference principle would not be chosen by equal human beings in the original position. Not only that, these experiments actually suggest another distribution principle, a principle whose outcome looks much more like Row D than any of the others alternatives.
This is Marc Hauser, Moral Minds, citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: “Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society.” Pg. 88
“Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to instill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders…Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right.” Pg. 89
This is strong, but not definitive, evidence that Rawls got it wrong with the difference principle. If we could somehow expand this study to a large random set of diverse cultures, and if the results of distribution-choice stayed the same, I think the curtain would fall on DP for good.
I’m not a Rawlsian, but I it’s clear that — using his own formula! — his difference principle is in a lot of trouble.
April 10th, 2008 23:41
2 things.
1. The difference principle only comes into play to justify inequalities. I don’t have my copy of theory of justice with me, but as I recall, Rawls makes clear that the difference principle doesn’t simply maximize the worst-off: it doesn’t *prefer* C to A. We might prefer C to A on other grounds, like efficiency, and the difference principle *permits* a move from A to C.
2. There’s a passage — I forget the precise number, but it’s in the section called “a tendency to equality” I believe (11? 13? 17? some prime number between 10 and 20). There, Rawls says that he thinks that facts called “chain connection” and “close-knittedness” holds, such that you can’t really raise the condition of the worst-off without raising the others too. But, he says, if those facts were not the case, it might be appropriate to have some kind of lexical rule: maximize the worst off, then maximize the next worst off, then maximize the next worst off, etc.
So I really don’t see anything to this objection;.