[Reader-list] On Contemporary Justice Theory

[A. Mani]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29295


Why Contemporary Justice Theory Fails: The Missing Common Interest of
Human Rights and Reason

by Prof. John McMurtry

	
Global Research, February 15, 2012


WHY CONTEMPORARY JUSTICE THEORY FAILS:

THE MISSING COMMON INTEREST OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND REASON

by

John McMurtry


While contemporary justice theory has become the most well-known field
of philosophy in recent decades, it presupposes the same first premise
of value choice as the ruling disorder.  The implicit baseline of
rational decision is pecuniary self-maximization.

 Contemporary justice theory assumes, but nowhere justifies this
ground of rationality. It is Contemporary justice theory assumes, but
nowhere justifies this ground of rationality. It is simply the given
from which reasoning begins. As John Rawls the originator of
contemporary justice theory says in passing reference in A Theory of
Justice (1971), “it is rational for the parties to suppose they do
want a larger share - - -The concept of rationality adopted here - -
is the standard one familiar in social theory” (p.143). He cites Arrow
and Sen and others, but nowhere justifies the assumption they assume
as given. It is the first principle of modern rationality, and no-one
inside the tradition challenges it. That the assumed rationality is in
truth the opposite of reason which seeks to take account of others’
interests, not just the furtherance of one’s own, does not compute in
the market logic which rules. All want more as rational. This is the
first principle of modern theory, and no-one inside this reigning mind
order challenges it.

The ultimate failing in principle is: all shared life goods - both
natural and social - are blinkered out a-priori. Money income for self
stands in as the first principle of value gain, and rights without any
life-necessity ground bind competing conceptions. John Rawls reposes
on these life-blind first principles throughout, and sets the liberal
agenda. Defence of Lockian private property with no limit is the
opposed right-wing agenda of Robert Nozick.  For over 40 years these
much elaborated impressions have ruled official political philosophy
across the English-speaking world. At the same time, the reigning
money-sequence system itself is off-limits to discuss.  Money-capital
as the determiner of the real world is an unspeakable in the
discourse.

The life substance of both justice and injustice are thus abstracted
out a-priori. The central issue becomes, instead, one of money-value
“incentives” to “the talented” to “serve the least advantaged”. This
is the cover story that is argued over ever since. Anglo-American
philosophy on justice is usually about it. The life-and-death problems
confronting humanity are thereby screened out within the primary myth
of the ruling ideology - that inequality of money gain is based on
personal talent.

Since more money-possession comes from assumed “superior talent” of
individuals, private control of money capital by inheritance,
one-pointed greed, blind luck, dishonesty, tax and obligation
avoidance, and so on are all blinkered out. More deeply, the
underlying social structural issue of ever more money wealth allocated
to the few at the ever greater expense of the many with no higher
talent involved is suppressed a-priori. All that is discussable now is
locked into the terms of the mythic assumption of unequal wealth from
‘superior talent’. One can fashion an imagined set of principles and
institutions to base incentives on serving the least advantaged (the
Rawls school). Or one can reject the whole premise of any
re-distributive scheme at all and argue only for absolute right to
keep the wealth as one pleases (the Nozick or ‘libertarian’ school)
The question of private money capital control as the decider of wealth
independent of any personal talent nowhere arises, however, as review
of the vast literatures on “the difference principle” confirms.

The examples used are instead deviously selective and disconnected
from reality. Nozick features Wilt Chamberlain selling tickets to see
him play and his right to have the unequal wealth. The literature on
Rawls features the pay for superior performance necessary to get a
woman surgeon to do the surgery rather than the gardening she prefers.
On the basis of such examples, necessary money incentives to the
talented or no redistribution of wealth however extreme the inequality
stand as the central ideas of social justice.

Abstracting Away Everything that Ultimately Matters:

Mapping High Theory’s Correspondence to the Life-Blind Ruling System

The general principle from which these hot-house debates are
generated, “the difference principle” of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,
is more interesting. It is that “the higher expectations of those
better situated are just if and only if they improve the expectations
of the least advantaged members of society”.

While Rawls and high-end justice theory appear to propose a high
standard here, all the ultimate questions of social justice are
blinkered out. The ground of private property itself, money-capital
right to become more with no burden, natural resources left over for
others, the non-waste obligation, the protection of common life
support systems, organic means of existence and the production of
them, the rights and duties justly assigned to ensure their provision,
and how humanity is to live with Nature so as not to despoil it - -
All of these issues are abstracted away along with the real world and
the life-and-death problems of a just social order.

>From here, critical discussion turns on how inequality of the income
of the ‘more talented’ can be justified. The implicitly cordoned-off
areas of discussion are worth identifying to comprehend how this
framework of analysis of social justice preconsciously conforms to the
ruling money-sequence program of rule. However ultimate their
importance to our lives and their right regulation, the following
foundational areas of concern are blocked out:

(1) the biophysical world itself and its universal requirements of reproduction;

(2) human needs, their nature, criterion and universal structure;

(3) production of the means whereby societies live, and its organizing
principles of regulation;

(4) the nature of actual money-capitalist society and its money-profit sequence;

(5) the conception of any of (1) to (4) as normative issues or questions;

(6) any right or obligation of justice not based on contractual
agreement of atomic individuals;

(7) any resource to repudiate any social regulator as evil;

(8) any allowance of method to ground in or introduce (1) to (7) as
what must be addressed by a theory of justice.

“What is left that matters?” one might ask. This is a question that
does not arise within the field.  The field of real-life problems of
social justice is ruled out by the life-blind syntax of argument
itself. The universal human life necessities and goods, the just
organisation of their provision and the civil commons principle, the
natural life-ground and the human vocation are a-priori expelled from
this meaning and value structure. At the same time, the actually
ruling capitalist system, its money-sequence logic and destruction of
social and ecological support systems are effectively off-limits to
evaluate. In these ways the reigning philosophical vision of social
justice is life-blind like the ruling system, and taboo against
raising questions is by a-priori device rather than by censorship or a
gun. From the start, discussion of “the difference principle” is
linked to the neo-economic standard of “Pareto optimality”, a
touchstone of modern social and philosophical sciences. Although
Pareto himself does not define the principle in natural language, it
means a condition in which no-one can be made better off without
someone being made worse off.  Against surface appearance, however,
the Pareto principle is consistent with the most extreme
immiserisations of most human beings. For example, if the given
distribution is a very small fraction of society in control of most of
its money-capital assets – as today – Pareto “optimization” would
leave all their wealth intact with no redistribution because this
would make the super-rich ‘worse off’, and thus be a violation of
Pareto efficiency. Rawls recognises a problem here, but shifts it to
the deplored feudal past. “It may be that under certain conditions”,
he says with emphasis added, “serfdom cannot be significantly reformed
without lowering the expectations of some representative man, say that
of landowners (p. 12).

G.A. Cohen’s  Egalitarian Rescue Remains Within the Ruling Alibi as
First Premise

Former Marxian scholar, G.A. Cohen, goes with Rawls to the Pareto
principle in Rescuing Justice and Equality (2009), but he too rejects
it as inadequate for justice. Both he and Rawls, however, entirely
sidestep the capitalist world reality of allocating money to
money-capital profit without limit or desert. This is the ticket in
the door. Global capitalism itself is off-limits to discuss. Indeed
none in this dominant discourse ever engages the actually ruling
structure of global injustice, nor develops a principled alternative
to its regulating mechanism.

Since the elephant in the room is not there, the human and ecological
world being trampled does not enter as an issue. As Antonio Gramsci
has observed, hegemonic ideas never touch the essential core of ruling
economic relations. While standing against any inequality, Cohen
declines also to question Rawls’ position that inequality-producing
incentives do get people to produce more real goods from which the
poor benefit. Instead just-so stories continue to stand in for reality
to reflect the reigning myth of the system: to wit, there are
specially talented and productive individuals, they alone can produce
what people need more of, and the issue is whether to give them higher
money incentives to perform their superior work.

Life-coherent reason does not go down this primrose path. It observes
there is no criterion of life need here, nor account of the actual
productivity of life goods by the higher paid, nor sound correlation
of incentives to either. All this is taken for granted in accord with
the ruling myth. What is not reflected from the wider world, however,
is any trace of the actually ruling system of inequality to which no
part of the myth applies. In the real world, it is not talented
individuals receiving more merit pay, but a financial sect’s control
of money sequencing to more private money with no productive merit
required and at steeply rising costs to the majority’s lives and their
common life support systems. The basic structure of injustice is thus
pre-empted from view to attend to the unrecognised myth.

With life-value, money-capital profit and the common life-ground all
unspeakable within this disconnected framework, in short, the
multiplying assumptions at work construct an ideological illusion
which is uncritically reproduced by radical justice theory itself.
Money inequality is correlated with superior persons and their
performances of value for others - the ultimate alibi of the corporate
system made first premise. Its popular version, which Rawls emulates
without notice, is: “the rich create a larger social pie from which
the poor benefit”.

Economic Science and Pareto Optimum/Efficiency Unmasked in Principle

The man behind this idea is Pareto, the leading mantra-name in
rational choice theory. His position is worth briefly visiting not
only because Rawls and Cohen do not, but because it discloses the
pedigree of the principle from which the reigning discourse on justice
comes. To begin with, Pareto’s canonical Manual of Political Economy
itself repudiates any equalising mechanism as economic nonsense.[9] It
is only used “to get rid of one aristocracy and replace it with
another” (p. 93), he says, with aristocratic rule as “what always
exists” (pp. 311-12). It is a law of nature which only “decadent” and
“degenerate” members of the ruling class oppose, he declares as
self-evident in echo of the rabid Friedrich Nietzsche.

These ‘decadents’ are only moved to by a “morbid pity” or because they
are “eager for perverse enjoyment” (p. 73). Pareto thus affirms war
and the mass killing as necessary to “European civilization” whose
advance  he regards as “the fruit of an infinite number wars and of
much destruction of the weak - - [by whose] sufferings the present
prosperity has been acquired” (p. 48). “Very moral civilized people”,
he asserts, “have [also] destroyed and continue to destroy, without
the least scruple, savage or barbarian peoples”. All the “so-called
liberal professions [medical care and education, for example]”, he
declares in implicit pre-emption of any compensating services to the
poor, “derive their income from factory owners” who would be deterred
from producing wealth for society by such “humanitarian absurdity” (p.
304).

We may thus see in Pareto the core intellectual program of the global
corporate system of rapacious greed which economists pervasively
justify as “Pareto-optimal”.  While it seems paradoxical that liberal
egalitarians would appropriate Pareto to their apparently opposite
cause, there is less paradox than first appears. Pareto’s principle of
“equilibrium”, as he calls it, in which none can be made better off
without others being made worse off - is a logic of status-quo
adhesion. It is consistent with the most extreme and growing
life-value deprivation of the majority in the name of a bigger pie for
all, as he recognises.

Rawlsian Justice as Trickle-Down Myth in  Formal Costume

This is where the Rawlsian difference principle seems to ensure
fairness and justice where the Pareto principle does not.  Yet when we
examine it more carefully, we find that it has no criterial limit on
justifiable inequality to ensure that it not as permissive of the
inequality which the capitalist idea of ‘trickle-down’ has justified
in the decades since Rawls’ famous A Theory of Justice was published.
In fact, almost every capitalist gain-scheme advocated in the world
since - global free trade and investment without borders, ever lower
taxes and regulation, ‘right to work’ breaking of unions , and so on –
has been represented as a policy to benefit the poor. Now even the IMF
now calls its privatizing-pay-bank-debt programs “poverty alleviation
programs”.

With no life-value standards grounded in, people’s life necessities
and goods can be relentlessly degraded and deprived and so long as
money-income rises a few cents for the poor, “the least advantaged” or
“poorest” are believed to have been “uplifted out of povery” and
“justice” thus served. We see here how income stand-in for human life
necessities and goods can lead to the most unjust results without
notice - especially when, as now, average or mean quantities erase the
low extremes from view, and “out of poverty” elevation occurs at two
dollars a day.

Consider here subsistence farmers driven from their farmland, their
family and their community  supports into the city – as hundreds of
millions are every decade – with nothing but the price of a coffee in
new income counting as “millions lifted out of poverty”. We hear
variations on this story non-stop. Where does philosophy of social
justice then turn? Only by grounding in a defined set of means of life
themselves universally necessary to human survival and flourishing is
the problem soluble; and only civil commons evolution led by the
life-coherence principle of validity builds the process of social
justice in life-value terms.

Since more money-possession comes from the “superior talent” of
individuals, the issue of private control of money capital by
inheritance, one-pointed greed, luck, dishonesty, tax and obligation
avoidance, and so on disappears. So does the underlying social
structural issue of ever more money wealth being allocated to the few
at the ever greater expense of the many because it is a corruptly
life-blind system out of control. All that matters now is to work from
the myth of unequal wealth from ‘superior talent’. One can argue for
absolute right to keep the wealth as one pleases with redistribution
outlawed (Nozick) or to fashion an imagined set of principles and
institutions to base incentives on serving the least advantaged
(Rawls). The question of private money capital control without desert
is evaded as if it did not exist.

In these ways the reigning philosophical vision of social justice is
life-blind like the ruling system. Silencing of questions about it is
not recognised because it is by a-priori device. The real world of
monstrous injustice is simply blocked out by just-so stories – the
very same device which reigns in economic theory. The universal
life-and-death necessities of a just versus unjust social order are
left with no place in the conversation. As in the wider world,
grounding justice in what we all need to live as human is erased as a
thinkable possibility. Only income proxies and rights without life
content remain.

______________________________________________________



Best

A. Mani




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A. Mani
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