Liberty and Equality

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INTRODUCTION

The Errors of Egalitarianism

Tibor R. Machan

IT WOULD BE HARD to find someone who has no sympathies whatever with even the most radical version of egalitarianism. When we witness glaring discrepancies (what some call harsh inequalities) in wealth or opportunity between people who otherwise seem alike in every important respect, we tend to find that disturbing.

The inequality seems especially harsh when those deficiently blessed are working hard, playing by the rules, and so forth, while those more abundantly blessed seem to have acquired their plenitude by mere luck—perhaps by being born into the right family—not by any special exercise of prudence, wisdom, or other virtues. It seems unfair, and the intuition or commonsense impression is that, somehow, what is unfair should be made more fair.

Exactly what people mean by fairness tends to vary, however.

There is the somewhat primitive notion of fairness, according to which benefits and harms are seen to be fairly or unfairly distributed in relation to how parents tend to divide them in a household. But a family is a special context, and what fairness means in households is not morally primary; it derives from the obligation of the parent to care for all the children in that household (but not, for example, the kids down the street or in another country). If fairness as practiced in households were morally primary, we would be justified in demanding that parents care not only for their own children but also for all children.¹ Even in an intuitionist view of ethics, according to which our moral obligations rest on deep-seated feelings about right and wrong, this notion does not seem to hold water. And as a matter of common sense, it is clear that trying to care for millions of kids simultaneously could lead to some obvious neglect of one’s own kids, an apparent lapse of fairness. Collectivized child-rearing—letting the state function as parent, as Plato proposed—would be one logical end of the line of this approach. But again, most parents would recoil at the prospect of turning their progeny over to the government altogether.

But there is also the more plausible concern with fairness that we have noted, namely, that some people are facing dire straits through no fault of their own even as others enjoy luxury, ease, and unlimited vistas through no merit of their own. Some philosophers, Kai Nielsen² and Ronald Dworkin³ for instance, go so far as to argue that the foremost public priority, coming even before liberty, should be to establish a condition of equality among human beings with respect to the distribution of benefits and harms (or, in Dworkin’s argument, with respect to prospects for flourishing). They hold that the duty of public authorities is not to protect the rights of the individual to liberty but to establish a condition of more or less strict equality. There is, they suggest, a basic right to equality.

Radical egalitarians aim to ensure, via law and public policy, that we all get the same benefits in society, the same health care, the same education, the same Internet access, the same everything. Despite the claim that equal concern does not mean that government must ensure that everyone has the same wealth, no matter what,⁴ less radical versions veer inexorably in the same direction, pulled by the logic of the position. This is especially true now that modern liberals have regained their ideological prominence in the wake of the ideological collapse of the conservatives in the U.S. Congress, not to mention in Britain and Europe generally. Conservative politicians in particular have lost all credibility as principled defenders of small government and individual liberty, making the job of the disloyal opposition easier.⁵

Dworkin’s approach is of special interest here because he claims to hold a position many contemporary defenders of the market (outside of politics) also embrace: ethical individualism. At first glance, his account is not very different from what I call classical individualism:⁶ he believes that it is objectively important that any human life, once begun, succeed rather than fail—that the potential of that life be realized rather than wasted—and that this is equally objectively important in the case of each human life.⁷ Perhaps surprisingly, Dworkin also believes that one person—the person whose life it is—has a special responsibility for each life, and that in virtue of that special responsibility he or she has a right to make the fundamental decisions that define, for him, what a successful life would be.⁸

This kind of fundamental regard for personal autonomy would seem to be sharply at odds with coercive egalitarianism. But Dworkin goes on to claim that in constructing a theory of political morality, we will indeed arrive at an egalitarian theory, because [public morality] will insist that government must treat the life of each person it governs as having great and equal importance, and construct its economic and other structures and policies with that egalitarian principle in mind.⁹

But Dworkin makes an invalid jump here—from what individuals are responsible for, to what governments are responsible for. And his claim is self-contradictory. If we accept that governments must engage in the equalizing process claimed to be their function, they will end up squelching the individual autonomy the ultimate value of which is said to justify egalitarian rule in the first place. If every time an individual achieves something beyond what has been accomplished by others, one must give it up—no matter how personally valuable to oneself—then that person will hardly be responsible in fact for making a success of his or her own life, of developing his or her potentials wisely or managing assets prudently. One will have less of a chance than one would under freedom either to excel or fail at what is, by Dworkin’s own characterization, a personal moral project, one that in Robert Nozick’s phrase requires moral space and thus may not be constricted by government and other uninvited agents.¹⁰ Instead one will be thwarted and undermined at every turn. Dworkin ignores the fact that (adult) personal success is self-initiated, self-guided, and self-experienced. It simply cannot be divinely distributed and mandated by a governmental central planner.

Apart from the paradox in Dworkin’s stance, is there any merit to the egalitarian thesis?¹¹ Is it in any basic respect superior to the idea it opposes, to wit, that the first duty of a community’s legal authorities is to secure these rights, rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The contributors to this volume deal with many of the questions that arise in considerable detail. Here I can give only a few hints of certain fundamental philosophical difficulties with the egalitarian stance.

There is the problem, for example, that to bring about the requisite equality there must be a group of persons quite unequal to everyone else in their power to impose their will! (All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.) Even if the process begins democratically, the delegation of the kind of power needed to establish strong equality would rapidly render the administrators of public affairs significantly unequal in their power over others. The master and the servant do not enjoy the same level of control over each other.

When John Rawls argues that we need equal distribution of wealth, except when unequal distribution is to everyone’s benefit, the policies designed to achieve this goal will have to be imposed by people whose power to bring it about (or even to make the determination about what is the best mix of equality and inequality) puts them on a different playing field from the rest of us. On the other hand, if in keeping with the egalitarian ideal no one is allowed more power over others than anybody else, then what we have is a free society, in which inequalities of various kinds will pile up willy-nilly anyway, as they always do when a human society is free. And this points up a certain incoherence in the egalitarian ideal, suggesting that it is unworkable from the get-go.

There are problems with the assumptions underlying egalitarianism as well. As developed by Rawls, for example, the theory claims that everyone is ultimately in the same boat, morally speaking. None of us, for example, morally deserves any special advantages. This is because our character depends in large part on fortunate family and social circumstances for which [one] can claim no credit.¹²

In this view, none of us has very much to do with how we turn out, for better or for worse. When some of us end up better situated than others, this can have nothing to do with personal effort and achievement, only with luck. Nor is anybody responsible for failures, or for acting as a predator or oppressor of others. We are, morally speaking, all the same, neither better nor worse, neither more nor less deserving of the advantages we enjoy in life. All merely happens as it must. And since we are all in the same boat, a team, we are committed to sharing our benefits and burdens. Again, of course, some are more equal than others when it comes to actually organizing society along alleged egalitarian lines. Furthermore, those who accept the Rawlsian viewpoint would, one may assume, be regarded as morally more astute, even more worthwhile, than those who reject it, so much so that the former would be justified in coercing the latter into compliance with the social organization Rawls would like to set up.

The picture Rawls paints of our moral equality, if true, does suggest that there is something very wrong with the wide discrepancies of advantages in people’s lives. If it just happens to happen, through no one’s fault or credit at all, that a great many people are struggling to get by while a select few like Bill Gates are inordinately well off, that would certainly be morally problematic. Although such a purely accidental allotment of triumphs and tribulations could not by itself justify attempts to flatten the status quo, it would be the beginning of the case for such reform. If, in addition, we are all on same team, belonging together, all equally responsible for each other, this moral duty, combined with the first condition, might justify mandatory sharing of the team’s benefits and burdens.¹³

Philosophers Peter Unger and Peter Singer call for just such reform in their books Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence¹⁴ and Practical Ethics.¹⁵ As Unger puts it, On pain of living a life that’s seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others.

Unger’s claim isn’t merely a lament. Nor is it merely a call for some measure of generosity, either local or global. It is, rather, a demand for the coercive redistribution of wealth. Yet it is also a call for personal conduct that is supposedly consistent with morality or ethics. Under the Ungerian ethic, all of us should work for drastic reforms in the political systems in which Westerners happen to live with all the wealth they happen to have. Egalitarianism is thus both a political and a moral crusade, demanding that people do the right thing via their political institutions and, when it comes to their personal conduct, demanding that they give away all of their own wealth beyond whatever is deemed subsistence level.

Yet the call for the mandatory redistribution of benefits and harms via public policy, and the imperative to exercise personal generosity and charity, go contrary to the original Rawlsian assumption that none of us can help what we are and do, and can be assigned no credit or blame for what we have done or not done.¹⁶ And therein lies the rub: no one can agree to support egalitarian public policy or personal morality if no one has any control over his or her own conduct.

To say, "One ought to establish public policies that equalize economic and other relevant conditions among people throughout the world" is to implore people to do something they may or may not choose to do. It assumes that they are able to choose what they will think, how they will act. It assumes moral self-responsibility. Yet moral responsibility cannot be attributed if Rawls is right and our moral character is not of our own making but is merely a predetermined epiphenomenon of family and social circumstances for which [one] can claim no credit nor blame. Que sera, sera, all the way down, as it were.

But if we do have the chance to make moral choices in our lives, then at least the Rawlsian egalitarian project is incoherent. Because then not all of us who find ourselves in dire straits absolutely had to be. And some are there through no fault of their own but through the clear fault of others, who are then morally responsible themselves.¹⁷

Nor need all those with greater advantages have failed to deserve them.¹⁸ It is not only luck that led to Bill Gates being a billionaire while many others were barely getting by from month to month, with little to set aside for rainy days. Bill Gates may have been born with talents or potentials that others were not born with, but he then had to choose to