The State by Anthony de Jasay (28 page)

known examples.) Once conduct need no longer conform to a central maximization assumption, "anything goes," which is precisely the weakness of such approaches, though this need not prejudice their suggestiveness and teachability.

1. It takes only a modicum of poetic licence to impart the idea that it is a sensible thing to vote for a type of society in which you would not come to great harm even if your particular place in it were designated by your enemy. Thus is a non-rational, impressionistic case established for maximin, the egalitarian bird in the hand as the counsel of conservatism, prudence and moderation.
   
 

2. Perhaps without realizing that he has moved on to non-rational territory, Rawls bolsters this case, in the spirit of his reflective equilibrium, by two related arguments. Both appeal to our intuition and he seems to regard both as decisive. One is the strain of commitment: people will refuse to "enter into agreements that may have consequences they cannot accept," especially as they will not get a second chance (p. 176). This is a puzzling argument. If we play "for real," we may of course lose what we stake. We do not get it back to play with again. In this sense, we never get a second chance, though we keep getting other chances in subsequent plays. They may be worse ones, in that we enter them weakened by the loss of our stake in the first play. Poker and business do have this cumulative character, where nothing fails like failure and chance favours the longest purse; pure games of chance and games of skill do not. Admittedly, if we draw a poor lot of primary goods, under the assumptions of the Theory of Justice, we will not get a chance to draw again in our and our descendants' lifetime. Social mobility is ruled out. Yet there is still a multitude of other gambles ahead, where we can be lucky or unlucky. Some of them, such as the choice of wife or husband,
   

having children, changing jobs, may be as decisive for the success or failure of our "life-plan" as the "stipend of primary goods" we have drawn. Naturally, a low stipend may affect our chances in these gambles.*46 Gambling for the lifetime stipend is, therefore, sure to be one of the most important gambles we ever face, which should by rights be an argument for, and not against, applying to it the rules of rational decision making.

1. If we know at all what we are doing, the term (for a lifetime, for all posterity) over which a given lot of primary goods, once drawn, is to last us, must of course be built into our valuation of each such lot from the worst to the best. It is precisely its lifetime term which explains why it is our entire life-plan which determines the relative intensity of our "need" for various-sized lots of primary goods. If drawing the lot of a dim-witted, idle beggar means living his life till we die, we are bound to weigh the risk of it very carefully. Our mathematical expectations of the utility of the lots among which there is such a repulsive one, must already reflect all our dread of this prospect. It seems double counting that, re-baptized "strain of commitment," it must reflect the same dread a second time.*47
   
 

2. No doubt we weigh the risk of death seriously. Death, whatever other prospects it may hold, in our culture is taken to exclude a second chance at earthly life. But it is obviously wrong to assert that the "strain of commitment" to an unacceptable outcome makes us refuse the risk of death. Our everyday peacetime life is abundant proof that we do not refuse it. Why would the risk of living a dim, idle and beggarly life be different in kind? It must all depend on our assessment of the probabilities characterizing the risk and of the attractiveness of the possible rewards we can earn by taking the risk. The "strain of commitment," if there is one, is a
   

legitimate consideration entering into these assessments. As a separate and overriding consideration, it is at best poetry.

1. Finally, it is incomprehensible to be told that good faith would stop us from accepting the strain of commitment, since if we took a given risk and lost (e.g. voted for a very inegalitarian income distribution and found ourselves in bottom place), we might not be able or willing to pay up (i.e. to accept the bottom place). If someone lets me bet him a million dollars which (unlike "Bet-a-million Gates") I do not have, I am acting in bad faith and he is acting rashly. But the "original position" of Rawls is not credit betting. If I turn out a dim bottom-person in the society I chose and which treats such persons badly, there is no obvious way in which I can "default." How do I refuse to honour my bet and play my allotted role of a dim bottom-person given that I am one? How do I extort from the more privileged members of my inegalitarian society a satisfactory minimum stipend and an agile brain? Considering that I could not if I would (and that as a dim person I may not even want to), the fear of my own default will not stop me. Good or bad faith, weakness of will and shame at not honouring my bet do not enter into it.
   
 

2. A separate informal argument contends that people will choose maximin, i.e. a tempered egalitarian distribution favouring the worst-placed, in order to make their decision "appear responsible to their descendants" (p. 169, my italics). Now it is one thing to be responsible and another to appear, to be seen to be so (though the two may overlap). If I want to do what I think is best for my descendants and never mind how my decision will look to them, I am acting as if I were a principal. In seeking to do as well for them as I would for myself, I might allow for their utility (say, the time-pattern of their "need" for primary goods) to be different
   

from mine. My rational decision, however, must still correspond to the maximization of expected utility, except that it is my best guess of their utility I will try to maximize. If maximin is not rational for me, it does not become rational for my descendants either.

1. If, on the contrary, my concern is how my decision will look, I am acting as an employee or a professional adviser would rationally act for his principal. In addition to the latter's interest, he would consider his own. It is difficult to devise conditions in which the two are certain to coincide. For example, if he made a gain for his principal, his own reward, fee, salary or job security might not increase proportionally. If he made a loss, his own loss of job or reputation as a responsible treasurer, trustee or manager might be more than proportional. As his assessment of the ex ante risk entailed in an ex post gain need not be the same as that of his principal, it cannot even be said that if instead of acting selfishly, he tried to maximize his principal's gains he would be acting (i.e. taking the same gambles) as would the principal.*48 In general, it is unlikely that if he maximized his expected utility, he would also be maximizing that of his principal, or vice versa. The two maxima will tend to diverge, the decisions of the employee being usually biased to ward off possible blame and to conform to conventional wisdom; the principal for whom he is acting cannot know that this conduct does not maximize his utility but only that of the employee.
   
 

2. If maximin, a bird in the hand and selling your uncertain birthright for a guaranteed mess of pottage were asserted often enough to be the responsible thing to do, the employee would rationally have to opt for them if his maximand was best served by appearing responsible to his principals, like Rawls's contracting parties who
   

want to appear responsible to their descendants. Here, then, is a fairly successful deduction of moderate egalitarianism from rationality. Rawls has accomplished this at the cost of having parents arrange the future of their children with a view, not to the latter's best interests, but to what would probably make them look prudent in their children's eyes. Some parents no doubt do behave like this, and some might even help install the welfare state in order that their children should praise their forethought;*49 but on the whole the argument hardly looks strong enough to explain the terms of a unanimous social contract and to support a whole theory of justice.

3.4.2
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Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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3.
Democratic ValuesLove of Symmetry

Wanting equality for its own sake is no reason for wanting one equality rather than another.

1. One-man-one-pay and one-man-one-vote are not rules providing their own justification.
   
 

2. Everybody is bound to like ultimate goods like liberty, utility or justice. Not everybody is bound to like equality. If the democratic state needs consent and obtains some by producing some equality (a rather summary description of one type of political process, but it will have to do for my present purpose), it is the function of liberal ideology to inculcate the belief that this is a good thing. The high road leading to harmony between state interest and ideological prescription is to establish a deductive link, a causal relation or a reciprocal implication between ends which nobody disputes, such as liberty, utility and justice on the one hand, and equality on the other. If the latter produces the former, or if the latter is indispensable for producing the former, it becomes a simple matter of consistency, of plain common sense, not to dispute equality any more than one would dispute, say, justice or well-being.
   
 

3. Hearsay has it that there are such deductive links: that freedom presupposes an equal sufficiency of material means; that social welfare is maximized by redistributing income from rich to poor; or that rational self-interest induces people unanimously to mandate the state to look after the least privileged. On examination, however, the detailed arguments from which the hearsay is distilled, prove unsuccessful. Like most hearsay, they have influence without quite silencing controversy and doubt. Far from establishing its universal validity to which men of good will
   

cannot help but agree, it leaves the ideology vulnerable just as a religion which has the misplaced ambition of claiming the validity of logical deduction or scientific truth for its beliefs, is vulnerable. A less ambitious way, invulnerable to refutation, is to postulate that people do like equality for its own sake (so that its desirability need not be deduced from the desiredness of anything else), or at least they would if they recognized its essential character.

1. People love symmetry, their senses expect it, they identify it with order and reason. Equality is to a system of rules as symmetry is to a design. The essence of equality is symmetry. It is the basic presumption, it is what people visually or conceptually expect to find. For asymmetry as for inequality, they naturally look for a sufficient reason and are disturbed if there is none.
   
 

2. This line of reasoning tells people that it is inherent in their nature to approve of such rules as one-man-one-vote, to each according to his needs and the soil to him who tills it. In each of these rules, there is a clear symmetry which would be spoilt if some men had two votes and others one or none, if some (but only some) were given more than their needs and if some land belonged to the tiller and other land to the idle landlord.
   
 

3. However, if the choice is not between symmetry and asymmetry but between one symmetry and another, which is it inherent in human nature to prefer? Take the design of the human form, which must accommodate two arms and two legs. The arms can be placed symmetrically on either side of the spine, or symmetrically above and below the waist, and so can the legs. Between vertical and horizontal symmetry, which is right? A human figure with two arms on the right shoulder and hip and two
   

legs on the left shoulder and hip would strike us as rather off-putting, not because it was asymmetrical (it would not be), but because its symmetry violated another to which our eye has become accustomed. Similarly, the preference for one order over another, one rule over another, one equality over another does not in any obvious manner spring from the depths of human nature, even if the preference for order over disorder may be plausibly held to do so.

1. The choice of a particular order, symmetry, rule or equality over its alternatives needs either habit, custom, or the force of substantive argument to explain it; if it is the former, political theory gets swallowed up in history (which might be a well-deserved fate) and if it is the latter, we will be back to square one, making derivative cases for a liberty-securing, a utility-maximizing or a justice-dispensing equality rather than proving the claim that equality for its own sake is intrinsically desirable.
   
 

2. It is worth spelling out that one equality crowds out another and that, as a corollary, the resulting inequality can always be said to have some equality as its reason and indeed its justification. (The adequacy of such a justification may have to be established, but this is very different from establishing the superiority of equality over inequality.) Take, for example, one of the central preoccupations of egalitarianism, the relations of symmetry or otherwise that prevail between workers, work, pay and need. One possible relation is equal pay for equal work, an equality which can be extended into the proportionality that more or better work should earn more pay.*50 If this rule is good, it is a sufficient reason for inequality of remunerations. Another rule which suggests itself is to keep symmetry, not between work and pay, but between work and the satisfaction of the worker's needs; the