Contractarianism
Nic Tideman: Peace, Justice and Economic Reform
Suppose first that voters vote on the basis of their selfish personal interests.
Then voting is incoherent as a basis for justice. If voters always vote selfishly,
then at any time when you might think that the voting was over, there will
always be some measure that can be proposed that will benefit a majority at
the expense of a minority, which could therefore be adopted by selfish voting.
The process of deciding by voting will never end if any proposal can be advanced
at any time and people always vote selfishly. Selfish voting can be used to
decide between any two proposals. And it can be used in more general settings
if there is some more or less arbitrary stopping rule to keep the process from
going on indefinitely. But selfish voting as a general mechanism for determining
what is just is
incoherent.
Now suppose that voters behave as unselfish, disinterested judges of what
is best. In this case, voting as a mechanism for determining what is just
is incomplete, because it leaves unanswered the question of what is meant
by "best." Does "best" mean "creates
the greatest total utility" or "comes closest to preserving the expectations
of the status quo" or "maximizes the rate of growth of the population" or
something else? How would you know what best means? If the Supreme Court
knows that what
is best is what comes closest to preserving the expectations that have developed
from our Constitution and traditions, then the justices can employ voting
to decide cases and establish new precedents. But to say that what is just
is
what is voted to be best by unselfish, disinterested judges without specifying
what best means is to decline to answer the question of what justice is.
Thus neither selfish voting nor unselfish voting serves to define justice,
although
there can be an element of voting in our efforts to resolve disagreements
about what an agreed definition of justice requires in particular circumstances.
If voting cannot be used to define justice, one might entertain the possibility
of using a contractarian formulation: What is just is the rules to which
people would have agreed if they did not know their personal circumstances.
In his
1958 paper, "Justice as Fairness," John Rawls said,
[Suppose that a group lets] each
person propose the principles upon which he wishes his complaints to be tried
with the understanding that, if acknowledged, the complaints of others will
be similarly tried, and that no complaints will be heard at all until everyone
is roughly of one mind as to how the complaints are to be judged. . . . each
person will propose principles of a general kind which will, to a large degree,
gain their sense from the various applications to be made of them, the particular
circumstances of which being as yet unknown.[3]
This is a reasonable recipe for implementing the Golden Rule and a fine idea
for seeking agreement about the principles by which complaints shall be judged.
If people were to follow this suggestion and achieve the agreement that is
described, they would achieve fairness.
However, this does not make Rawls's suggestion a good way to identify justice.
The critical difficulty with his suggestion is that those who mete out justice
cannot afford the luxury of securing complete agreement on principles. They
must bring their judgement to bear on those who have not agreed on principles.
In this context, the closest that a person can come to Rawls' suggestion
is to ask himself, "Are the principles that I propose to apply ones
that I would agree to if I did not know how I would personally be affected
by
them?"
In later writings, Rawls claims that in the original position, people would
choose the rules that maximized the well-being of the representative member
of the least advantaged class.[4] John Harsanyi,
on the other hand, has said that in the original position people would choose
the rules that maximized average
utility.[5] Someone
else might say that in the original position people would choose the rules that
provided the greatest
stability. How can we know what people would choose?
No matter how a contractarian answers this question, there will be the difficulty
raised by Ackerman, in Social Justice in the Liberal State. Describing
the attempt to apply the Rawlsian criterion, Ackerman says:
Despite my best efforts, I shall be defenseless
. . . the moment I try to make it clear to another person why it is right that
I, rather than he, should establish a claim over a disputed thing: I: When
I look into myself, I am sure that I would have insisted upon this right as
a condition for entering society with you. YOU: You haven't the slightest idea
what you would have insisted on in a presocial state. You're simply using the
idea of a potential entrant as a screen upon which to project the deepest desires
of your socialized self. But I too have desires; why should mine be sacrificed
to yours? And if you insist, it is possible that I too may delve deep into
my psyche and find a transcendent grounding for my desires.[6]
The sword of justice is too momentous to be constrained by only the requirement
that those who judge be able to convince themselves that their judgements
satisfy principles to which they would have agreed, if they had not known
how they
would be affected by those principles. The contractarian approach may be
a good way to seek consensus. It may be a good guideline for those who are
called
upon by disputants to arbitrate between them. But it is not a good way
to define justice. read the whole essay
Nic Tideman: The
Ethics of Coercion in Public Finance
A second common way of coping with
the lack of disinterested
parties is through Contractarianism. This is the axiom that it is
just to coerce people to abide by rules to which they would have
agreed before they knew how they would be personally affected by the
rules.
There are several theories of
justice that employ the
Contractarian axiom. In The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and
Tullock develop a theory of democratic principles growing out of a
"constitutional setting." In this setting people are presumed to
reach a consensus on rules with the greatest aggregate value, because
they do not know what their roles will be in conflicts to which the
rules will be applied.
The most famous modern application
of Contractarianism is John
Rawls' 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. Rawls argues
that behind a "veil of ignorance" regarding one's personal
characteristics, a person would want the rules that maximized the
well-being of the representative member of the least advantaged
class. To most economists, Rawls' specification of what would concern
people behind a veil of ignorance sounds completely arbitrary and
unfounded. If people are going to be overwhelmingly concerned about
losing in the lottery of life, why would they focus on the
representative member of the least advantaged class and not on the
worst possible individual outcome? Why would people be unwilling to
trade a minute loss by the least advantaged class for a substantial
gain by the second-least advantaged class?
John Harsanyi (1975) argues that
behind Rawls' veil of ignorance,
people would not be concerned exclusively with the well-being of the
representative member of the least advantaged class. Rather, they
would recognize that they had equal chances of being all persons, and
therefore, to maximize their expected utility, they would choose the
rules that maximized the sum of individual utilities. The Buchanan
and Tullock framework is consistent with Harsanyi's claim.
Another theory that applies the
Contractarian axiom is Ronald
Dworkin's (1981) theory of justice as equality of resources. Dworkin
justifies an income tax as the expression of an insurance policy that
people would desire before they knew their talents.
The fact that people using the
basic idea of Contractarianism
could come to conclusions as different as those of Rawls and Harsanyi
is a reflection of a limitation of the axiom. Even if one of them has
it wrong and the other right, the disagreement suggests that the
Contractarian axiom is inevitably too vague and too subject to
self-serving or idiosyncratic interpretations to serve as a basis for
achieving consensus.3
To put the difficulty with
Contractarianism in a somewhat
different light, suppose that a person asks, "Why is it just for you
to use your power to deprive me of what I want?" The Contractarian
exercising power responds, "Because you would have agreed to the rule
that deprives you, before you knew what your role in this dispute
would be." The deprived person can respond, "No, not me. I never
would have agreed to that." To justify the deprivation, the
Contractarian must declare that the deprived person is mistaken or
deceitful about that to which he would have agreed. Anything that the
deprived person says about who he is or what has happened in his life
can be declared to be irrelevant to the question of what rules he
would actually have favored in a properly constructed contractual
setting. The flesh-and-blood person asking for a justification of
power goes unanswered.
Contractarianism does have
potential value as an organizing
principle for seeking to resolve disputes, because sometimes it will
be possible to persuade a person involved in a dispute that what he
seeks is inconsistent with a rule to which he would have agreed
before he knew his personal role in the particular dispute. But
Contractarianism is dangerously vague as limit on what people with
power accord to themselves. It is too easy to convince oneself that
people would have agreed to whatever you like in the hypothetical
contractual setting....
Read the whole article
Nic Tideman: Improving
Efficiency and Preventing Exploitation in Taxing and Spending Decisions
Rawls sets his proposals in the framework of a fourth possible principle of
public action, the contractarian suggestion
that it is just to coerce people to abide by the rules that they would have
agreed to if they had had a chance, before they knew their individual circumstances.
One difficulty with this rule is that it is so hard to know what it is that
people would have agreed to in these circumstances. Rawls is convinced that
people would have agreed to a lexical ordering of maximum individual liberty
and the maximin principle. John Harsanyi offers a strong argument for the proposition
that they would have agreed to the rules that would maximize total (or, equivalently,
average) utility. This has some strange implications. For example, if it is
possible to separate individuals into ascetics and sybarites, then the maximization
of total utility requires that the ascetics be forced to work very hard, with
the resulting output used for the benefit of the sybarites. And if one of your
kidneys (or your eyes) would provide me with more utility than it provides
you, then the state is justified in extracting it from you and giving it to
me. Utilitarianism does not accommodate
individual rights.
The disagreements among contractarians about what contractarianism implies
provide a hint of a difficulty that Bruce Ackerman elaborates in Social
Justice in the Liberal State: Contractarianism offers so little defense
against people with power who delude themselves about the undeniability of
their beliefs about what people would agree to before they knew their personal
circumstances. The person who feels oppressed says "I never would have agreed
to these rules before I knew my personal circumstances." Those with power reply, "It's
obvious to us that you would have. Stop your griping." The scope for further
dialogue is small, and the potential for abuse is great.
Another possible framework for the justification
of government action is that those with power are simply elitists: They may
believe that their exercise of power is justified by their superior understanding
of the nature of the good. While it is not unreasonable to suggest
that there are some persons who do have superior understanding of the nature
of the good, it is extremely dangerous for people to justify the exercise
of political power by self identification as members of the elite who have
superior understanding of the nature of the good. It was thinking of that
sort that gave the world Stalinism. The general thrust of Western political
thinking has been that elitism is simply unacceptable as a justification
for the exercise of political power.
On the basis of the arguments given, I reject
conservatism, majoritarianism, egalitarianism, contractarianism, and elitism
as justifications for coercive taxing and spending. A framework for
just social arrangements that does make sense to me is classical liberalism,
which asserts that it is just to coerce people to accord others the maximum
individual liberty that all can have. This means that people have rights
to their bodies, their talents, the products of their labor, and the returns
to their savings. Anything produced by human effort belong to the producer,
or to the producer's successor in title through gift and exchange. ... read
the whole article
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