Equality in Love, Care and Solidarity: A Critique of Eva Kittay's 'Love's Labour'

Although I initially found myself agreeing with Eva Kittay’s argument, upon further inspection I found it extremely difficult to maintain that same enthusiasm for her writing. Despite agreeing with Kittay on the basis that an egalitarian theory of justice should be fairly distributional, it is essential that we first question what exactly it means to be both ‘free and equal’ and why is it that social cooperation is so necessary for egalitarians?

Freedom and equality are at the heart of egalitarian thought. Egalitarians believe that all people should be treated equally, and this involves a degree of ‘social cooperation’. Although the logistics of this are highly complex and varying it is safe to assume that in egalitarian thought, all human beings are considered free and equal in terms of both status and worth. In Kittay’s article she is predominantly concerned with critiquing Rawls’s theory of social cooperation and believes that his thoughts are insufficient and do not adequately take the position of dependents into consideration. For Kittay, Rawls’s perception of social cooperation is insufficient, i.e. that social cooperation is a necessity as a means to achieving an ends. Kittay does not agree with this as she believes that in order for this to be applicable, all citizens need to be rational and reasonable which she believes cannot possibly be achieved by dependents. Kittay argues that in order for dependents to be considered as citizens, then Rawls’s list of ‘primary goods’ needs to be urgently expanded. Kittay believes that a Rawlsian account of justice is not sufficient in a society where the recognition of dependency is a concrete component of justice.

My thoughts on this are as follows. I believe that Rawls intends his primary goods to be considered as a building block towards social justice and although Kittay feels that they are inadequate, they are still fundamentally egalitarian in that they revolve around the notion of fair and even distribution. Although I agree with Kittay in principle, I think it fundamentally boils down to interpretation issues. If Rawls considers both basic and non basic liberties among his primary goods, then surely Kittay’s argument is indefensible as her concerns over dependency and reciprocity have actually been included by Rawls in his A Theory of Justice? Furthermore, as part of Rawls’s ‘Two Principles of Justice’, he focuses on the fair distribution of the aforementioned primary goods, including the distribution of social welfare. It is here that Kittay’s fears over dependency should be quelled as care, including the care of dependents, is intended by Rawls to be an element of social welfare.

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Opportunity and Responsibility

In this post I shall comment on Richard J. Arneson's 1989 paper “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare”.

Arneson presents an interpretation of distributive equality based on Rawlsian welfare arguments, albeit in a more refined structure. With the a priori understanding that “opportunity” is the chance of obtaining a good if it is one's will, Arneson suggests that people ought to be presented with equivalent arrays of options when facing their life decisions (the degree of frivolity or mundaneness of these decisions is not clarified by the author). It is important that as opposed to an Equality of Resources approach (like Dworkin's), in this construal presents actions associated with outcomes, and therefore the element of accountability comes into play. This is important to Arneson because one becomes responsible for poor decisions made in an ideal environment of full awareness of information, in a calm state of mind and a flawless reasoning. Indeed...

Arneson will admit that in this real world with unequal access to information for citizens and policy-makers alike, and full of imperfect judgement, differences in the implementation of his own interpretation of distributive equality with those of Rawls or Dworkin may be hard to distinguish. It would revolve most importantly around the standards agreed by these societies on what resources and welfare mean. I take issue with the notion of considering talents to be resources at the disposal  common distribution, firstly because it is completely contrary to the democratic-liberal ideal of self-ownership, and secondly because it would discourage people from actually developing a talent. Furthermore, under a Rawlsian regime one's condition may become highly deterministic, where one can never be at fault and the system is supposed to readjust to compensate for one's preferences. Case of the matter is that the theoretical foundations for each do differ, even if practise is fairly similar. Perhaps it is for this reason that Arneson recurs to Sen's capabilities approach in regards to what welfare is supposed to mean (fearing that it could be no more than a set of resources not that different from Dworkin's). If Rawls suggests society ought to aim for a distribution of basic social goods, Sen's approach is centred around the effect. In other words, how much it contributes to the individual's capabilities. Out of the whole paper, I would say this is the single most sensible argument, for Equality must aim for the enablement of people. We provide education because it will enable knowledge, hospitals enable health, food enables nutrition, so on and so forth. If we consider Arneson's proposal to be valid, in a universe where everyone knows what is best for them (again, indeed...) we would have the choice to pursue happiness by the means we deem most fit, and we would have the option to do so, even if initial circumstances (like ethnicity, economic status or gender) might present an obstacle to this. I will refrain from bashing Arneson's wishful universe where all this is possible and simply state that at a theoretical level his proposal is sound.

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Global Luck Egalitarianism, Responsibility and Desert

Put simply, global luck egalitarianism is what you end up with when you apply the principles of luck egalitarianism beyond the borders of the state. In this blog post, I want to put three questions to you:

1. Conceptually speaking, is global luck egalitarianism entailed by luck egalitarianism in general? That is to say, if one accepts the principles of luck egalitarianism, is one then bound to apply these principles globally, rather than confining them to a particular state.
2. Should we accept luck egalitarianism in the first place?
3. If we accept global luck egalitarianism, what consequences might this have in terms of how we shape international institutions in order to meet the demands of justice entailed by global luck egalitarianism?

So, just to refresh your memory, luck egalitarianism is essentially the view that it is unjust for some people to be worse off than others in virtue of nothing more than sheer bad luck. What we have is basically a contrast between brute luck and responsibility designed to pull out the sorts of intuitions which would make us likely to pity the man who is struck by lightning, but not the man who sticks the fork in the toaster.

It’s not difficult to imagine the sorts of ways endorsing this idea might apply in practice. We see that some people are born with medical conditions for which they are not responsible, so we decide to provide them with the medical resources necessary to overcome or minimise the disadvantage. Similarly, we can provide scholarships to children born into families who might otherwise not be able to afford the same standard of education open to their more well-off co-citizens, and so on.

The move from the national to international level works something like this: I should not bear burdens for circumstances for which I am not responsible. I am not responsible for having been born in the country in which I have been born. Because I have been born in this country, rather than that country, I face significant burdens as to my quality of life. Therefore some sort of redistribution of resources (which might be material resources from you to me, or your country to mine, or you could offer me citizenship perhaps) is necessary in order to meet the demands of justice.

There is of course an important empirical step in the above argument, whereby we need to show that the person really is worse off because of their bad luck in being born in country X rather than country Y. I don’t think it would be very difficult to demonstrate in most cases, however, since we have plenty of data which shows the enormous inequalities in terms of living standards (including everything from basic food and water rights to availability of education, healthcare and access to political institutions) between much of the developed and the developing world.

So, to repeat the three questions, given the above:

1. Conceptually speaking, is global luck egalitarianism entailed by luck egalitarianism in general? That is to say, if one accepts the principles of luck egalitarianism, is one then bound to apply these principles globally, rather than confining them to a particular state.
2. Should we accept luck egalitarianism in the first place?
3. If we accept global luck egalitarianism, what consequences might this have in terms of how we shape international institutions in order to meet the demands of justice entailed by global luck egalitarianism?

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The right to work

I would like to give a brief blog post as a preamble to next week’s topic of works role in an egalitarian society and weather one should be guaranteed access to work. For me this issue is essential to an egalitarian society. Work has had a central role in the development and life of human beings since the dawn of our species. The opposing thumb is a physical expression as to our evolutionary tendency to labour. In this sense, work is as fundamental to being human as love and friendship and the desire to produce and develop is universal to mankind. We are both a social and a productive species. The right to work therefore for me is as close to a natural right as we can come across, not only on normative grounds, but also on the same biological grounds as establishes the right to food and shelter. To fully develop ourselves as rational agents we must have the right to work. Demonstrating this fact is the considerably higher rates of depression, suicide, and chemical dependency among the unemployed. It is clear that capitalism is unable to deliver on this right. That people actively seek employment in lieu of social welfare is demonstrated by the large amount of individuals who labour at minimum wages despite their weekly income barely justifying the work instead of sitting at home and collecting social welfare.
There is a concern however that the jobs provided by a bureaucratic state would not be socially useful and therefore would leave those in them still lacking in self esteem. However I believe this can be overcome by payment being linked to work for charitable, political, civil or not for profit organisations who would apply to the state to have certain jobs listed as state funded for the long term unemployed and for a higher wage then that of welfare payments. In this way the worker will know they are fulfilling a socially useful task not being provided by the state as simply “make-work” solution. What is more, if the work is carried out for not-for-profit organisations the private sector may have little basis for complaint as often the work is focussed around areas the market has no interest in, i.e animal welfare, litter, homeless organisations

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