Reflections on Alexander Rawls's Desert-Inclusive Justice.

• Author: Van Schoelandt, Chad

In this symposium, Alexander Rawls interestingly discusses how and why one may incorporate claims of desert into John Rawls's conception of justice. After briefly reviewing the divergence of Rawls from Rawls, I argue that John Rawls was concerned with principles of justice for governing ideal cooperation, whereas Alexander Rawls shifts to a nonideal theory concerning justice for a society in which productive cooperation is neither universal nor independent of incentives. In this way, Rawls and Rawls come to different answers because they ask different questions. The final section notes John Rawls's concern for the function of a public conception of justice and the challenge of maintaining moral relations given the fact of reasonable disagreement about justice itself.

Justice as Fairness versus Justice as Fair Desert

John Rawls calls his conception "justice as fairness," so I will call Alexander Rawls's desert-incorporating conception "justice as fair desert." These conceptions agree that to assess society's basic institutional structure, one should consider what agents in a properly constructed original position would endorse. (1) Justice as fairness and justice as fair desert further agree that to support impartiality such agents should be ignorant about their particular place in society, though they disagree about what information agents should possess.

In A Theory of Justice ([1971] 1999), John Rawls excludes information about one's natural talents, fortunate social position, and even one's character enabling the use of one's talents because one does not deserve those features (sec. 17). Ultimately, the agents in justice as fairness do not consider any desert-based claims and do not take the income a person may get with her talents in a free market to be relevant considerations. Desert is maintained only within institutions, not as a fundamental criterion for judging society's basic structure. In contrast, Alexander Rawls argues that respecting people's moral agency implies recognizing that they have fundamental claims of desert for productive use of their talents. Within justice as fair deserts, then, the agents consider desert-based claims along with the fact that people have different degrees of deservingness and that it is essential for society's functioning to incentivize people to become deserving.

I want to emphasize that Alexander Rawls maintains agents' impartiality by denying them knowledge of which person they are in society and leaving them ignorant of their natural talents, social positions, and levels of desert. Agents in justice as fair desert do not reason from knowing that they are very deserving or undeserving but consider that the society as a whole will have people who do deserve what they earn in the market and other people without such deservingness. The agents likewise know that some people in the society will have significant needs that those people themselves cannot or will not meet, so such people depend on others for satisfying their needs. The agents do not know, either, if they are among the needy people, so they must consider principles and policies from the perspective of someone who could turn out to have extensive or minimal claims of desert or need. (2) Thus, the agents must balance these interests.

John Rawls argues that the agents deciding in the circumstances he specifies would select principles requiring equal basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the "difference principle," which permits inequalities in wealth and income only insofar as doing so works to benefit the least well-off, as through providing incentives. (3) It is this last principle that Alexander Rawls rejects because the focus on maximizing the position of the least well-off can come at the expense of the very deserving. Justice as fair desert, then, holds that instead of the difference principle there should be a balancing of the need-based claims of the least well-off and the claims of the more well-off have to deserve their incomes in a free market. (4)

Alexander Rawls seems to hold that adding desert creates substantial changes in the policy applications of the conceptions of justice, though I am not clear on what differences it actually makes. He suggests policies different from those that John Rawls or that others typically associated with John Rawls suggest, but he argues for many of these policies in ways that seem relevant to justice as fairness instead of being particular to justice as fair desert. Empirical claims about the effects of policies motivate the policies in ways that would apply as much to justice as to fairness and do not depend on appeal to the fundamental desert claims particular to justice as fair desert. For instance, Alexander Rawls holds that the most productive people and their productivity are crucial to society's vitality, that societies can function and prosper only if recognizing and incentivizing productivity as allowing people to keep their market incomes tends to do, that government redistributive assistance programs tend to increase poverty by reducing incentives for both the better-off and the worse-off to be productive and by directing resources from the more to the less productive, and that welfare programs may be the biggest cause of poverty and needs. (5) He seems undoubtedly correct that vastly more important for satisfying people's needs is overall productivity to greatly expand wealth rather than redistributions of existing wealth. Moreover, market-based societies generate tremendous amounts of wealth and widely disburse benefits, including to many of the least well-off. (6)

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