13 Mar Only if everyone begins at the same starting line can it be said that the winners of the race deserve their rewards. (MICHAEL J. SANDEL)
Rawls presents this argument by comparing several rival theories of justice, beginning with feudal aristocracy. These days, no one defends the justice of feudal aristocracies or caste systems.
These systems are unfair, Rawls observes, because they distribute income, wealth, opportunity, and power according to the accident of birth. If you are born into nobility, you have rights and powers denied those born into serfdom. But the circumstances of your birth are no doing of yours. So it’s unjust to make your life prospects depend on this arbitrary fact.
Market societies remedy this arbitrariness, at least to some degree. They open careers to those with the requisite talents and provide equality before the law. Citizens are assured equal basic liberties, and the distribution of income and wealth is determined by the free market. This system—a free market with formal equality of opportunity—corresponds to the libertarian theory of justice. It represents an improvement over feudal and caste societies, since it rejects fixed hierarchies of birth.
Legally, it allows everyone to strive and to compete. In practice, however, opportunities may be far from equal. Those who have supportive families and a good education have obvious advantages over those who do not. Allowing everyone to enter the race is a good thing. But if the runners start from different starting points, the race is hardly fair.
That is why, Rawls argues, the distribution of income and wealth that results from a free market with formal equality of opportunity cannot be considered just. The most obvious injustice of the libertarian system “is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view.”11 One way of remedying this unfairness is to correct for social and economic disadvantage.
A fair meritocracy attempts to do so by going beyond merely formal equality of opportunity. It removes obstacles to achievement by providing equal educational opportunities, so that those from poor families can compete on an equal basis with those from more privileged backgrounds. It institutes Head Start programs, childhood nutrition and health care programs, education and job training programs—whatever is needed to bring everyone, regardless of class or family background, to the same starting point.
According to the meritocratic conception, the distribution of income and wealth that results from a free market is just, but only if everyone has the same opportunity to develop his or her talents. Only if everyone begins at the same starting line can it be said that the winners of the race deserve their rewards. Rawls believes that the meritocratic conception corrects for certain morally arbitrary advantages, but still falls short of justice. For, even if you manage to bring everyone up to the same starting point, it is more or less predictable who will win the race—the fastest runners. But being a fast runner is not wholly my own doing.
It is morally contingent in the same way that coming from an affluent family is contingent. “Even if it works to perfection in eliminating the influence of social contingencies,” Rawls writes, the meritocratic system “still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents.”12 If Rawls is right, even a free market operating in a society with equal educational opportunities does not produce a just distribution of income and wealth.
The reason: “Distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.”
Rawls concludes that the meritocratic conception of justice is flawed for the same reason (though to a lesser degree) as the libertarian conception; both base distributive shares on factors that are morally arbitrary.
“Once we are troubled by the influence of either social contingencies or natural chance on the determination of the distributive shares, we are bound, on reflection, to be bothered by the influence of the other. From a moral standpoint the two seem equally arbitrary.”
Once we notice the moral arbitrariness that taints both libertarian and the meritocratic theories of justice, Rawls argues, we can’t be satisfied short of a more egalitarian conception. But what could this conception be? It is one thing to remedy unequal educational opportunities, but quite another to remedy unequal native endowments. If we are bothered by the fact that some runners are faster than others, don’t we have to make the gifted runners wear lead shoes? Some critics of egalitarianism believe that the only alternative to a meritocratic market society is a leveling equality that imposes handicaps on the talented.
An Egalitarian Nightmare
“Harrison Bergeron,” a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., plays out this worry as dystopian science fiction. “The year was 2081,” the story begins, “and everybody was finally equal . . . Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” This thoroughgoing equality was enforced by agents of the United States Handicapper General. Citizens of above average intelligence were required to wear mental handicap radios in their ears.
Every twenty seconds or so, a government transmitter would send out a sharp noise to prevent them “from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”15 Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen, is unusually smart, handsome, and gifted, and so has to be fitted with heavier handicaps than most. Instead of the little ear radio, “he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses.” To disguise his good looks, Harrison is required to wear “a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.”
And to offset his physical strength, he has to walk around wearing heavy scrap metal. “In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.”16 One day, Harrison sheds his handicaps in an act of heroic defiance against the egalitarian tyranny. I won’t spoil the story by revealing the conclusion. It should already be clear how Vonnegut’s story makes vivid a familiar complaint against egalitarian theories of justice. Rawls’s theory of justice, however, is not open to that objection. He shows that a leveling equality is not the only alternative to a meritocratic market society.
Rawls’s alternative, which he calls the difference principle, corrects for the unequal distribution of talents and endowments without handicapping the talented. How? Encourage the gifted to develop and exercise their talents, but with the understanding that the rewards these talents reap in the market belong to the community as a whole. Don’t handicap the best runners; let them run and do their best. Simply acknowledge in advance that the winnings don’t belong to them alone, but should be shared with those who lack similar gifts. Although the difference principle does not require an equal distribution of income and wealth, its underlying idea expresses a powerful, even inspiring vision of equality
JUSTICE
MICHAEL J. SANDEL
