Priority in Practice: A Research Network
 

 

Priority in Practice: 17 th and 18 th September 2003

Wednesday September 17th

9.45 Coffee and Registration

10.15 Introduction

10.30 Avner de-Shalit, Jerusalem - Disadvantage and Risk

11.30 Ingrid Robeyns, Amsterdam - Responsibility in Sen's Capability Approach

12.30 Lunch

 1.30 Martin Rechenauer, Munich - Constraints on an Index for Justice

2.30 Jo Wolff, Philosophy, UCL - Indexing in multiple dimensions.

3.30 Tea

4.00 Veronique Munoz Darde, UCL - Numbers and health care

5.00 David Miller, Oxford - Justice and Public Goods 

6.00 Close

Thursday September 18 th

9.00 Coffee

9.30 John O'Neill, Lancaster - Cost Benefit Analysis and the Environment

10.30 Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Copenhagen - The badness of discrimination

11.30 Dan Hausman , Madison – Are Health Inequalities Unjust?

12.30 Lunch

 1.30 Marc Fleurbaey, Pau , Social Welfare, Priority to the Worst Off, and Dimensions of Individual Well-Being Paper

2.30 Mathias Risse, Harvard – Racial Profiling 

3.30 Tea

 4.00 David Peritz, Sarah Laurence College - Deliberative Egalitarianism and the Limits of Principle-based Reasoning and Deliberation

5.00 Nick Tyler, UCL - Transport and Disability

6.00 Closing session

6.15 Close

 

Abstracts:

Avner de-Shalit: Disadvantage and Risk

1. Lack of wealth is not necessarily the core of disadvantage.

2. Starting from a survey of cases of environmental injustice it

is suggested that very often people who are disadvantaged are exposed

to risks which they would not have taken had they had the option, or

are forced to take risks, that in one way or another are bigger than

others are being exposed to or take.

3. Examples from other spheres of disadvantage (employment,

housing ) may support this definition.

4. Applying this definition to Sen's theory of capabilities it is

suggested that disadvantage is a situation in which one's capabilities

become insecure involuntarily. This bears interesting implications.

5. The Cross-capabilities Syndrome. Attempting to secure the

capability that becomes less secure under the new circumstances, one

is forced to take other risks, or, in other words, other capabilities

become insecure. This might shed light on Sen's notion of ‘coupling of

disadvantages '.

6. However, ‘disadvantage as risk' does not exhaust the meaning

of disadvantage.

Ingrid Robeyns: Responsibility in Sen's Capability Approach

If one wants to develop Amartya Sen's capability approach into a theory of justice, several lacunae need to be filled. This paper focuses on one of those lacunae: the role of personal responsibility. Given that responsibility is a central normative notion in luck egalitarianism, it is natural to ask whether we should develop a version of capability luck egalitarianism. However, in the last couple of years, several criticisms have been formulated questioning the core normative ideal of luck egalitarianism. I review those criticism and the defenses, and conclude that on balance the critiques stand and thus capability luck egalitarianism is not the way to go. I therefore analyze an alternative – a capability sufficiency view – and assess its criticisms. Some of these criticisms can be countered, while others need to be dealt with when developing an outline of a qualified version of capability sufficiency. The paper concludes by looking at how the latter deals with personal responsibility and outlines what additional work needs to be done before the full view can be assessed.

Martin Rechenauer - Constraints on an Index for Justice

To follow

Jo Wolff – Indexing in Multiple Dimensions

If advantage and disadvantage are plural, then deciding who is better and worse off is problematic, unless dominance holds, which it rarely does. Consequently different weighting systems may give different orderings However from the point of social justice we do not need a complete ordering but only to identify the worst off. group . If the same people regularly appear towards the bottom of the ordering, even as weightings change we can be confident that they are among the most disadvantaged, even if we do not endorse any particular weighting system. This approach also suggests how to develop an egalitarian public policy in terms of ‘decoupling disadvantage'.

Veronique Munoz Darde, UCL - Numbers and health care

To follow

David Miller, Oxford - Justice and Public Goods 

To follow

John O'Neill, Lancaster - Cost Benefit Analysis and the Environment

To follow

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen: The Badness of Discrimination

Paradigm cases of discrimination are very bad and very obviously so. However, it less clear exactly how far our concept of discrimination extends. Also, it is not clear if all forms of discrimination are bad. It is not even clear for what reasons paradigm cases of discrimination are bad. My ambition in this paper is to clarify these issues. First, I offer a taxonomy of different forms of discrimination. Next, I argue that these are pro tanto bad, when pro tanto bad, because they harm people in that they make them worse off than they would be under a just distribution. Finally, I discuss two versions of the view that some forms of discrimination are bad independently of whether they harm anyone relative to a just distribution.

Dan Hausman , Madison – Are Health Inequalities Unjust?

It seems obviously unjust that people born in many of the poorest regions of the world die young and suffer from preventable diseases, while those born in richer countries (and especially in their upper echelons) can generally expect to live long and healthy lives. But is the culprit the inequality in health itself, or the fact that inequalities in health correlate with and bear causal relations to other factors? This paper argues that distributions of health are not themselves just or unjust. They are of importance from the perspective of justice only as causes, or consequences, or components of other inequalities.

Marc Fleurbaey, Pau , Social Welfare, Priority to the Worst Off, and Dimensions of Individual Well-Being

When well-being is one-dimensional, the key ethical issue for the de fi nition of social welfare is the degree of inequality aversion, whichcan be discussed with variants of the Pigou -Dalton transfer principle.When it is measured in terms of primary goods, functionings or capabilities , individual well-being is fundamentally multi-dimensional. It is then important to take account of individual preferences over the different dimensions. This has interesting consequences for the defi nition of social welfare. This chapter shows how the axiomatic techniques of social choice can then be used to justify particular social welfare functions and derive suitable criteria for the assessment of reforms of the Welfare State and consequences of globalization.

Mathias Risse, Harvard – Racial Profiling 

Although racial profiling is a matter of great concern in the U.S. and elsewhere, there is little philosophical reflection on this subject. Our goal is to provide a normative assessment of profiling. Our argument rests on two assumptions about the productivity of profiling in curbing crime. First, we posit that there is a significant correlation between membership in certain racial groups and the tendency to commit certain crimes. Second, we assume that given such a tendency, to stop, search, or investigate members of such groups differentially will help curb crime. That is, we assume that such measures eliminate more crime than other measures for equivalent expenditures of resources and disruption. If these assumptions fail, the question addressed here no longer arises.

Arguments for profiling tend to be utilitarian in nature, but it also has been argued forcefully that, once all costs of profiling are properly calculated, utilitarian considerations speak against racial profiling. Non-consequentialist arguments tend to enter the debate by way of rights- and fairness–based objections to profiling. In a nutshell, our central points are: First, while the utilitarian argument depends on circumstances, and draws on empirical considerations that are hard to verify, in a broad range of cases, utilitarian considerations support police and security measures that make race a consideration in deciding whom to stop, search, or investigate. Second (and this claim will come with some qualifications), at least as far as (many) African-American communities are concerned, the use of race in police tactics is neither unfair not does it violate any moral rights.

 

David Peritz, Sarah Laurence College - Deliberative Egalitarianism and the Limits of Principle-based Reasoning and Deliberation

In this essay I address the question: what is the appropriate relationship between deliberative democracy and economic or social egalitarianism? I am particularly concerned with substantive deliberative democracy, which claims that there is a way of conceiving and defending a body of values and ideals that shows them to be both widely acceptable in complex and diverse societies and also capable, if widely accepted, of supporting a practice of democratic deliberation likely to prove robust and legitimate in these circumstances. In what form should we express the substantive values that we claim should inform and regulate democratic deliberation and decision-making? Should substantive deliberative democrats import into their accounts of deliberative politics the most cogent and persuasive substantive principles of distributive justice egalitarian philosophy offers ?

I begin my answer by rejecting two views that characterize much recent writing on equality and deliberative democracy. On the one hand are liberal and luck egalitarians who deduce, through philosophical argument, a principle or set of principles to appropriately regulate issues of distributive justice. On the other are deliberative democrats who deduce from the very idea of democratic legitimacy or an account of its social bases a strongly egalitarian conception of democratic distributive justice. These views converge on the idea that the shared bases for public evaluation and justification legitimate deliberative democracy requires are to be identified by conceptions of justice (e.g. Rawls) or democratic legitimacy (e.g. Joshua Cohen). These conceptions furnish antecedently justified, substantive principles with sufficiently precise content to specifiy relevant duties and obligations, and to direct judgment and reason-giving in most standard contexts of evaluation and action. They thus share what I term a strongly principle-based model of reasoning and deliberation.

A satisfactory account of deliberative democracy must support egalitarian politics and policies. This is so, first, because, as a matter of political sociology, a society with extensive economic, social and status inequalities tends not to be either democratic or deliberative, and, second, because such a society is unjust. Thus I am led to suggest a more satisfactory alternative to the two dominant approaches that I term deliberative egalitarianism. Central to this view is a model of deliberation as a cooperative search for shared reasons guided directly by ideals of democratic cooperation and regulated only by a formal principle of justification that captures the core requirements of democratic legitimacy. I suggest that deliberative egalitarians concentrate less on defending principles of distributive justice and more on developing the plural family of values and ideals that may reasonably be held in common in a diverse and complex democracy. The question of whether deliberative egalitarianism is possible resolves itself into the question of whether deliberative politics informed by these values and ideals support egalitarian policies. I claim that they would.

My argument in this essay is largely negative in that it aims to convince ' prioritarians ' that they should not expect a priority or difference principle to play a large role in deliberative politics. I demonstrate that a strongly principle-based model of reasoning and deliberation does not work in the way that Rawls, Cohen and others suggest it will to secure egalitarian justice by insulating considerations of justice from the influence of self-interest. The successful pursuit of the guiding idea behind these approaches--making those who do worst in the distribution of income, wealth and social status as well-off as they possibly can be--is better served by forms of reasoning and deliberation that trade directly in ideals and reasons and in which substantive principles of distributive justice, to the extent that they play a role, are modified in light of or even emerge from the interplay of other kinds of normative considerations.

I scrutinize a principle-based model of reasoning and deliberation by focusing on the way that Rawls' difference principle would regulate the grounds for permissible differences in income and wealth in an ideal liberal-egalitarian society, as well as the guidance it offers us in combating inequality in the less liberal and egalitarian societies we actually inhabit. Specifically, I examine a number of criticisms of the difference principle leveled by G.A. Cohen in an important string of recent essays. In response to Cohen's challenge I investigate the relationship between Rawls' fundamental normative conceptions of cooperation and the person and his principles of justice with the aim of showing that the conceptions have both a justificatory and a normative primacy within the structure of justice as fairness as a whole. I believe that Rawls' reasons for assigning priority to conceptions over principles are good, though they are more complicated and less clearly worked out than they could be, so I seek to develop Rawls' analysis to render it more satisfactory. I argue that appreciating the relationship between fundamental normative conceptions and principle reveals that Rawls' theory contains resources, not well-developed by Rawls himself, that prove useful in answering some of the guiding questions of Cohen's recent work. I claim that Rawls theory can answer at least those of Cohen's questions that concern the application of the difference principle in an ideally well-ordered society and so offers a satisfactory ideal theory of liberal egalitarianism so long as the application and interpretation of the difference principle is guided by the content of the fundamental normative conceptions.

But the reply to Cohen also shows that a strongly principle-based model of reasoning and deliberation fails to articulate the practical requirements that follow from Rawls' fundamental normative conceptions. Even in the remote case of an ideally well-ordered society, reasoning and deliberation about what it means to structure differences in income and wealth so that they benefit the members of the worst-off group must be so strongly informed by the content of the fundamental normative conceptions that the difference principle adds little of substance to reasoning and deliberation. In the more urgent cases presented by the here and now of late-modern market societies, the difference principle offers poor guidance in pursuing the aim of living in a social world that treats all with the respect due to them as free and equal persons engaged in social cooperation over time, the aim, that is, of the highest-order practical interests or desires that Rawls' fundamental normative conceptions specify. I conclude that a model of reasoning and deliberation that relies less centrally on substantive principles and more directly on a cooperative search for shared reasons grounded directly in ideals of democracy, cooperation and legitimacy better enables us to realize the multifaceted task of pursuing egalitarian social justice in the poorly ordered societies we seem likely to continue to inhabit for the foreseeable future. This conclusion supports the more basic idea that a deliberative approach to the theory and practice of democracy holds better prospects for the successful pursuit of justice, legitimacy and equality than does liberal egalitarianism.

 

 

 

 

 

First workshop: UCL, April 2003

Third workshop: Kennedy School, Harvard April 2004

Fourth workshop: UCL September 15th-16th, 2004 (enquiries j.wolff@ucl.ac.uk)