The vice of equality

This post a while back talked about a certain impasse you're at when one or more of your moral values or assumptions lead you to conclusions that are at odds with the real world -- that is, in conflict with reality as you know it. At that point, as I said, your options are either to condemn or at least lament reality as not being good enough for you, or, as in reductio ad absurdam arguments, to begin to re-examine and question some of those moral values and assumptions that lead you into this impasse in the first place. I ended the post by singling out the assumption that I think is the one real culprit here, and the source as well of a great deal of moral and political confusion and worse in society generally -- this is the notion of equality.

First, let's try to be clear about the term. The equality contained in a phrase like "all men are created equal" is not a vice -- on the contrary, it's a great moral truth. But what does it mean? It clearly doesn't mean that all people are created equal in intelligence or looks or athletic ability or circumstances of birth or any other quality that may enable one to do better than another -- since that is manifestly false. It means, simply, that all people are created equal in status. Which means, among other things, what Anatole France famously mocked in his witticism about the law, in its majestic equality, forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, etc. He was right, certainly, about the limitations of such equality, but wrong to disdain its majesty -- because until the great bourgeois/capitalist transformations, such equality was virtually unknown, and the great mass of people everywhere lived permanently as inherently lower or lesser beings within an explicitly hierarchical structure of class or caste.

So, I'm referring here to substantive equality, not status equality, and when I use the term "equality" hereafter, it should be understand in the former sense as opposed to the latter. Nor do I mean that equality just as such is evil -- in itself, whatever equality or inequality occurs naturally or unforced is morally neutral. So the title of this post should really have been "The vice of forced substantive equality", but I thought the gain in technical accuracy wasn't worth the loss in impact.

"Forced substantive equality" means simply taking something away from one to give to another in order to make them more equal in whatever that "something" is -- typically money, of course. And it that sense it seems wrong just on the face of it -- not only because such taking ignores questions of desert or merit, not to mention simply differential desires or objectives, but also and primarily because it simply skips over the issue of "right". Who or what does this taking, and what gives them the right to do it -- i.e., how can you assume that the person from whom the money (say) is taken doesn't have a right to it in the first place?

At this point, philosophical egalitarians typically try to move into some variety of either consequentialism or contractarianism, and in either case the arguments can go, and have gone, on for a very long time. Both arguments, however, suffer from the technocratic delusion of grandeur -- the notion that some one or group is able to oversee the whole of society and judge who deserves what, or who has "agreed" to what, or what are the consequences of what. I've dealt with this to some extent in this post on "'Social justice' vs. 'just society'", and I don't want to get any more involved in that very basic error here. For now, it's enough to point out how forced equality violates our ordinary moral instincts, and how, as a result, what we might call "populist" egalitarians (to distinguish them from the more philosophical variety) typically try to attach the goal of substantive equality to other goals or issues that do have moral standing, such as helping the less fortunate.

But helping people who need help is obviously not the same as trying to make them more equal, even if, as a side-effect, it ends up doing so. In fact, one of the more effective ways of helping people is to provide them with a job, an action that might well have the equally irrelevant  side-effect of increasing inequality.

Another source of confusion is mixing equality up with issues of merit, as in denying (a presumption of) merit to those with more -- presuming, instead, that luck or nefarious practices accounts for their greater wealth, and assuming, therefore, that it's all right to take away such wealth. But merely presuming that someone's wealth is ill-gotten is obviously prejudiced and wrong. And just as wrong is the desire to take away the good fortune of others. Certainly we question the good luck of bad people or the bad luck of good people, but fortune per se, whether good or ill, can't tell us whether a person is good or bad. Luck itself, in other words, is morally neutral, but the wish to deny it to others is morally flawed.

So, once we strip away the confusions and irrelevancies surrounding the notion of forced substantive equality -- that it's not the same as equality of status, not the same as simply helping people who need it, and not required by some notion of merit -- then we're left with a core that has a distinctly unappealing aspect. Or, rather, a core the appeal of which is only to the darker impulses of human nature -- impulses such as common envy, or an embittered animus at the achievements of others, or a desire to pull down the successful. Here lies the real reason that the urge for this sort of equality persists in human societies -- not because it's a noble aspiration, like freedom or justice, or a virtue, like compassion, but simply because it's a vice, like greed or gluttony. In fact, while other vices seem driven by a more natural desire for mere creature comforts, this one appears to be one of the nastier, more neurotic, and more malicious, driven by its resentful comparison with others. It may well be responsible for more real harm in human society than all the other vices put together, and in any case it is the erroneous assumption at the root of a number of moral absurdities, of which Cohen's notion of socialism is just an example.

Socialism and a moral reductio ad absurdam

In mathematics, "reductio ad absurdam" is a type of proof that works like this: if you want to prove that something is true (or false), assume the opposite -- i.e., assume that it's false (or true) -- and then show that this assumption leads to an absurdity (typically a contradiction), from which you conclude that your assumption of the opposite was wrong, and that therefore the something is in fact true (or false). Indirect, but, in math at least, irrefutable. Outside of math, things are always a little messier, but a similar argument can be used in the case of moral or ethical issues as well -- if it can be agreed that a particular moral position runs into serious conflict with reality, then that alone should lead us to question the assumptions that led up to that position.

As a case in point, consider this review of G.A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism by Andy Lamey (entitled "The Thinking Man’s Marxist"). Cohen's brand of so-called "analytical Marxism" is immediately an oddity. To his great credit, he saw it as a contrast to what he apparently called "bullshit Marxism" -- namely, the vaporous rhetoric of the French post-structuralist, post-modern, post-post poseurs. But Marxist socialism, with its origins in Hegelian dialectic and its roots in a collectivist political backlash is, to say the least, a difficult fit with the arid, logical procedures of Anglo-American philosophical analysis. Nevertheless, Cohen tries to force the two together, with the result being the illustration of the moral reductio I've mentioned, at least as summarized by Lamey, who quotes Cohen as saying:

“The socialist aspiration is to extend community and justice to the whole of our economic life. As I have acknowledged, we now know that we do not now know how to do that.”

Cohen’s conclusion is thus a mixed one. We should endorse his two moral principles even though there is no sign they will lead to socialism any time soon. But perhaps they could have some application here and there, as in the education or health spheres. Or perhaps one day our circumstance will change and socialism will become possible. Cohen’s closing lines refer to markets as systems of predation. “Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.”

There's a kind of pathos here -- Cohen, raised in the socialist faith and desperately hoping to cling to it at whatever cost, was still both rational and honest enough to admit that, as far as he or anyone could see, it was an impossibility. What he could not do was take that one next step in the reductio sequence -- re-examining the moral assumptions that had led him into this fatal conflict with the real world. 

Cohen is by no means the only one brought to this sort of moral impasse, though he's more explicit about it than most. Others reaching the same dead end may decide that it's the world that's false -- or, in moral terms, not "good enough" -- rather than their beliefs, a kind of insanity, perhaps, that cultural processes akin to natural selection will tend to weed out. But there's no denying the depth of the crisis in which one is immersed when one's most fundamental values appear to be implicated in fundamental contradiction with reality. In a subsequent post, I want to look at the value that I think is primarily responsible for this kind of crisis: equality.

The mysteries of markets

The good folks at Crooked Timber once again provide fodder for thought, and once again it's John "Make the Rich Pay" Quiggan who's churning it out. Here he is opining about "interesting intellectual evolution":

There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets.

Which, given the context, no doubt is evidence of an evolution, even is it's only venturing onto land. The comments provided more fun, with one thinking the above description "would describe all but the far end of the American left" and then JQ characterizing his own passage as a "Rorschach blot", which he thinks means "I'm on to something, but I don't know what". The last clause, at least, is clearly true.

What he's onto, though, may be a concise illustration of the basic incoherence of the strategy of the so-called "Third Way" ("strategy", as opposed to pragmatic tactics, note). I tried to suggest that in a comment myself:

Whether Third Way, Fourth Way, or Nth Way, though, you may find that you’ll have a bit of a problem in accepting markets, etc. as “social contrivances” while rejecting the resulting income distribution. Unless of course you simply intend to ignore “normative claims” altogether. A vexing problem, no? Markets work well, or seem to, but for reasons that we don’t understand, and their outcomes are always so not fair….

But that was maybe a bit too cryptic for that neighborhood. To explain: markets only work, even as "social contrivances", because of the income distributions they generate. If you reject such distributions then you're essentially rejecting markets and their accompanying virtues. If, on the other hand, you accept the virtues of markets, then that alone is a "normative claim" -- calling them "social contrivances" doesn't get you out of the dilemma, since any and all social structures/processes can be so described. What's happening is that there are two distinct "normative claims" being asserted -- a socialist one, in which goods and services are literally "distributed" by some one or group on the basis of some notion of fairness; and a market-based one, in which goods and services are simply traded and not "distributed" in any but a metaphoric sense. And therein lies the incoherence.

On a practical level it's quite true that we routinely mix and match these kinds of claims, meaning that we routinely adulterate whatever non-market claims there are in order to obtain some benefits from market virtues for some, and then we routinely adulterate those market virtues in order to obtain some other "normative claim" as defined by ... well, we're never exactly sure. Messy, as the real world always is. But we can respect the practicalities of the situation -- social inertia, dependencies of various sorts, etc. -- while still working toward a resolution of the incoherence. In other words, we can choose fundamentally between working toward a First Way, or toward a Second Way, but striving toward a Third Way is the pursuit of a mirage.