The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (37 page)

highlight.

This can be seen by noting that maximizing the sum total of utilities requires

that every individual has the same marginal utility ± defined as the additional

utility derived by a person from the last unit of income received. If at a given distribution of income, the marginal utility of person A exceeds that of person B, then clearly the society's aggregate utility can be increased by transferring some income from B to A, because the utility gain of A would more than offset the

utility loss of B. Therefore, as long as marginal utilities are unequal, there will remain scope for increasing aggregate utility by redistributing income. Or, to put 146

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it differently, aggregate utility will be maximized only when all the marginal

utilities are equal.

According to one interpretation, marginal utility reflects thèùrgency of

human needs'' ± the higher the urgency of needs, the higher the value of marginal utility (Harsanyi, 1975). On this interpretation, utilitarianism ensures equality of different individuals' urgency of needs, by demanding equality of marginal

utilities (as a necessary condition for maximizing the aggregate sum of utilities).

But equality of urgency of needs must imply that in some sense everyone is

enjoying the same degree of need-fulfillment, so that no one is left with a greater urgency of needs compared to others. In this sense, the utilitarian principle of maximizing aggregate utility has been claimed to satisfy the fundamental egalitarian principle of ``giving equal weight to the equal interests of all the parties''

(Hare, 1976).

One consequence of accepting the utilitarian principle is that one cannot make

a fundamental moral claim for equality of income. This is because equality of

marginal utility ± which is the only kind of equality demanded by this principle ±

does not necessarily entail equality of income. Only in the special case, when all individuals have the same capacity to derive satisfaction from any given level of income (in economic jargon, when they all have the same utility function), will

equality of marginal utility entail equality of income. However, since it is entirely plausible to assume that different people have different capacities to enjoy and to derive pleasure from the same consumption of goods and services, the utilitarian principle will seldom demand equality of income in practice. Instead, it will

actually demand inequality of income in this general case. Yet, as has been noted above, utilitarianism has been claimed to be egalitarian in its own right ± in the space of urgency of needs.

There are, however, many problems with the utilitarian's claim to egalitarian-

ism. In the first place, serious questions have been raised about the plausibility of interpreting marginal utility as reflecting an individual's urgency of needs (Scanlon, 1975). Furthermore, critics have demonstrated how the application of the

utilitarian principle can lead to obviously inegalitarian outcomes. Sen (1973)

makes the point vividly by giving the example of a disabled man who needs more

resources than others to maintain any given level of mobility, and also has a

lower capacity to enjoy any given income, owing to his disability. The utilitarian principle will discriminate against this person in distributing income (because, from the point of view of maximizing total utility, it is better to give the marginal income to someone else who is better able to enjoy it), yet it is obvious that such discrimination will accentuate his disadvantage by denying him the resources

required for gaining mobility ± hardly an egalitarian outcome, by anyone's moral criteria.

This example illustrates a particularly onerous implication of accepting the

utilitarian concern with aggregate utility. But there are other ethical systems, which, in common with utilitarianism, accept utility as the fundamental object

of value but do not judge the goodness of a society in terms of the sum total of utilities. The whole class of ethical systems that take utility as the fundamental object of value is known as welfarism, of which utilitarianism is a special case On Inequality

147

(Sen, 1979). The example of the disabled man, which is such an embarrassment

for utilitarianism, need not be so for other systems of this class.

Consider, for example, a welfarist system that judges the goodness of a society

in terms of equality of utility distribution across the population rather than by the sum total of utilities. Since the disabled man finds it difficult to convert income into utility, a system that demands equal utility will have to encourage

positive discrimination in favor of him so as to give him higher income than

others. Higher income will then enable him to better overcome his problem of

mobility. The disabled man will not, therefore, embarrass a welfarist system that demands equal utility.

Can we then say that welfarism in the broader sense provides an egalitarian

principle ± equality of utility ± that is morally defensible? Not so, according to many a moral philosopher. One problem arises from a kind of consideration that

is in a sense opposite to that of the example of the disabled man discussed above.

Some people may be able to derive large satisfaction even from wretched condi-

tions of life. This is especially true of those who have come to accept their

entrenched deprivations as the normal way of life and have therefore learnt to

come to terms with their lives by trying to be happy with the smallest of mercies.

Equality of utility in this situation will serve to perpetuate and legitimize the entrenched deprivations that one segment of society may have imposed on

another and then made them accept with equanimity through a process of

cultural conditioning.

There is another line of criticism which takes a rather different approach. The

issue at stake here is a feature of welfarism known in moral philosophy as

consequentialism. Welfarism judges the moral force of any action simply by its

consequence ± in terms of the amount of pleasure or satisfaction. The process

whereby the satisfaction is derived ± whether by giving food to the hungry or by torturing an innocent man ± plays no role in moral evaluation. For obvious

reasons, this particular feature of focusing exclusively on consequence, with no regard for the rightness or wrongness of procedures, has long been a standard

criticism of utilitarianism. Clearly, the criticism applies equally to all variants of welfarism, not just utilitarianism.

At the other extreme, new ethical theories have been developed which focus

exclusively on procedures, with no regard for the consequences. It is instructive to explore the implication of these theories for the debate on inequality. One of the most elegant theories of this nature ± one that is of particular relevance in the economic sphere ± is due to Robert Nozick (1973, 1974). In this theory,

the justness or goodness of an economic arrangement depends on the justness

of the procedures whereby property rights are acquired.

Nozick has laid down some principles of justice in acquisition and transfer,

and argued that people are entitled to, i.e. they have a right to own, the holdings that are acquired through repeated applications of these principles. According to these principles, people are entitled, in the first instance, to what they produce with their own labor. Next, they are entitled to what is produced by resources

owned by them and what they can acquire by free exchange of what they

legitimately own. Finally, they are entitled to what is legitimately passed on to 148

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them through inheritance or gift, provided the person making the transfer was

entitled to the holdings that have been transferred.

Two features of this theory of entitlement are worth noting. The first feature

relates to the justification of the procedures that give rise to entitlements.

According to Nozick, the justification comes from the moral intuition that

these procedures are in some sense intrinsically right ± it seems intuitively

obvious to him that a just society must be based on these procedures. No

reference is made to the consequence of following these procedures in order to

justify them. This deontological or non-consequentialist nature of justification is an essential feature of Nozickian rights.

The second feature relates to the duties and obligations that the Nozickian

rights entail for others. Every right entails some obligation for others. In this case, the obligation takes the form of a constraint. My right to property entails that no one may prevent me from acquiring property as long as I follow the just

procedures, nor may anyone take away from me any property I have so acquired.

My right thus imposes a constraint on other people's behaviour. In this, Nozick-

ian property rights fall neatly in the general category of libertarian rights, all of which emphasize the importance of freedom from coercion.

In this conception of a just society, the object of fundamental value is people's liberty to acquire goods and services through the just procedure. No fundamental moral value attaches to the consequence of following those procedures, i.e.

what people can or cannot do with the goods and services they acquire, what

utility or satisfaction they derive from them, etc. To put it simply, once we have accepted the procedures as morally right, then we have to take the consequences, no matter what they are. Therefore, we cannot attach a moral claim to the

demand for equality of those consequences. In particular, we cannot demand

equality of income, because the distribution of income is nothing other than a

consequence of following the procedures for acquisition of property. As long as

the procedures that were followed are deemed to be just, the resulting distribu-

tion of income is also just, no matter how unequal it might be.

A certain kind of equality can still be demanded, however, even within this

framework. It is the equality of liberty to acquire property through the just

procedure, because that is the fundamental object of value in this system.

Equality of liberty will not, however, lead necessarily, or even typically, to

equal distribution of income. Given equal liberty, differences in people's physical and intellectual abilities will result in unequal acquisition of resources in the first round; and these inequalities will be perpetuated, in the second round, partly

through inheritance and partly through the greater bargaining power that

attaches to concentrated wealth when it comes to the transfer of resources

through free exchange. Thus, once again, equality in one space may be perfectly

consistent with, and may even necessitate, inequality in another. A libertarian

can thus oppose or at least fail to attach any value to the demand for equal

distribution of income (or of utility, for that matter), while claiming to be

egalitarian in a fundamental sense.

As in the case of welfarism, however, in this case too one must ask whether the

object of value taken as fundamental in this system can indeed be accorded an

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149

overriding moral importance in preference to everything else. The critics have

raised moral doubt on this issue by invoking Isaiah Berlin's (1969) famous

distinction between negative and positive freedoms. To make the distinction

concrete for the present context, consider the case of a person engaged in the

task of acquiring food for her family by following the just procedures of

acquisition as laid down by Nozick. The justness of the procedures being

followed entails that she is entitled to the food she acquires and that no one

must obstruct her pursuit of food. If she is indeed allowed by others to acquire food in a legitimate manner without let or hindrance, then she can be said to

enjoy the negative freedom of acquiring food. If the food she so acquires is

enough to allow her family to stave off hunger, then she can also be said to enjoy the positive freedom from hunger.

In reality, however, the negative freedom to acquire food in a legitimate

manner need not go hand in hand with the positive freedom from hunger. As

Amartya Sen (1981) has pointed out in his famous study of contemporary

famines, millions have died in famines not because they were denied the negative freedom to acquire food in a legitimate manner, but because the food acquired

through legitimate means was simply not enough to ensure survival. Because of

this lack of a necessary correspondence between negative and positive freedoms,

any moral system that might want to attach value to positive freedoms cannot be

satisfied with negative freedoms alone. This is precisely the problem with the

Nozickian system. Note that negative freedom is a matter of respecting pro-

cedures, whereas positive freedoms lie in the domain of consequences. So, by

attaching fundamental moral importance to procedures and denying any inde-

pendent moral value to consequences, the Nozickian system ascribes exclusive

value to negative freedom with no regard whatsoever for positive freedoms.

It is arguable that an ethical system that disregards the moral status of

consequences must be fundamentally inadequate. Yet, as was noted earlier, the

most celebrated consequentialist system, utilitarianism, and its generalization, welfarism, whose essential characteristic is to focus on utility consequences, have severe problems of their own. What one needs, therefore, is a system that pays

due regard to consequences, but defines consequences broadly enough to go