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Egalitarianism and the Separateness of Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Dennis McKerlie
Dennis McKerlie*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, CanadaT2N 1N4
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Extract

Different people live different lives. Each life consists of experiences that are not shared with the other lives. These facts are sometimes referred to as the ‘separateness of persons.’ Some writers have appealed to the separateness of persons to support or to criticize moral views. John Rawls thinks that the separateness of persons supports egalitarianism, while Robert Nozick believes that it supports a rights view. I will call the claim that the separateness of persons counts in favor of a particular moral view the ‘positive connection.’ Both these writers think that utilitarianism is objectionable because it ignores the moral importance of the separateness of persons. I will call the claim that the separateness of persons counts against a moral view the ‘negative connection.’

In this paper I will discuss several different attempts at explaining the connection between the separateness of persons and specific moral views. I will begin by describing how egalitarianism, unlike utilitarianism, treats individual lives as morally important units. I will discuss the kind of egalitarianism that aims at equality, but the same points could be made about egalitarian views that give priority to helping the worst off or require that everyone should receive at least a specified minimum share of resources or happiness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 205 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

1 Neither feature is required for a moral view to count as egalitarian. One kind of egalitarianism might call for equality in the simultaneous parts of different lives without making any claims about complete lives. And if a view assigns values to benefits and harms in a different way than utilitarianism - for example if it assigns more value to a benefit for someone badly off than to a benefit of the same size for someone better off - then it could reach egalitarian conclusions even though it did not make claims about the relationship that should hold between different lives. I will not discuss this kind of egalitarian view because it could not be supported by an argument about the separateness of persons.

2 Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 330Google Scholar

3 Ibid., 337

4 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 28Google Scholar

5 Nagel, Thomas The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970), 142Google Scholar

6 Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974), 33Google Scholar

7 I will say more about whether Rawls and Nozick really do argue in this way for the positive connection. Nagel seems committed to the argument. He writes

Perhaps the model is no more than an image, but it seems to me a useful one, for it renders plausible the extremely strict position that there can be no interpersonal compensation for sacrifice. If one works from that position, then one will arrive at a result similar to that which Rawls derives from his construction. That is, one will feel that first priority must be given, in any principle of combinatorial weighting, to improving the lot of those in the population who are worst off, and that it is permissible to increase the benefits of those who are better off only if it is not at a cost to those below them. (Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, 142) But Nagel does not explain how, by starting from the idea that there is no interpersonal compensation for sacrifice, we will eventually arrive at Rawls’s principles of justice.

8 It might seem odd not to say more about the first step since that is where the argument bases a moral claim on the separateness of persons. I am not suggesting that we should accept the argument’s first step. But the appeal to the separateness of persons is used to determine the content of egalitarianism as well as to argue for it, and to assess these accounts of egalitarianism it is necessary to consider the connection between the objection to balancing and specific egalitarian principles.

9 Rawls, 27-8

10 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 337

11 This criticism would not apply to some ways of restricting the objection to balancing. For example, some statements of the objection to balancing suggest a restriction similar to negative utilitarianism: it is a loss or a sacrifice by one person which cannot be outweighed by a gain for someone else. Understood with this restriction, the objection to balancing would not be a restatement of an egalitarian moral principle. However, this version of the objection to balancing would not support all of the conclusions that egalitarians want to draw.

12 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 337

13 Rawls, 28

14 Ibid., 29

15 Parfit says that Rawls gives two arguments for his principles of justice: the contractualist argument, and the argument that they are required by the plurality of persons (Parfit, Derek ‘Later Selves and Moral Principles’ in Montefiore, Alan ed., Philosophy and Personal Relations [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973), 137-69CrossRefGoogle Scholar - see 166, n. 52). He cites Rawls (29) for the second argument. But the reasoning on p. 29, even if it were convincing, would only refute utilitarianism, not positively support Rawls’s own principles of justice.

16 Rawls, 191

17 Ibid.

18 However, it is not certain that the objection to balancing is behind Rawls’s view that benevolence cannot resolve conflicts between the goods of different people. He may just mean that since benevolence is a sentiment it cannot be expected to answer a complex question about which person to help (Rawls, 191). But the interpretation that I have suggested would give a positive role to the objection to balancing in Rawls’s case for his principles of justice.

19 Rawls discusses Nagel’s thought experiment of choosing principles of justice by imagining ourselves splitting and becoming all of the people affected by the principle (Nagel, The Possibility of Alturism, 141-2; Rawls, 190-1). Nagel thinks that in these circumstances we would choose Rawls’s principles of justice. Rawls is not completely unsympathetic to Nagel’s claim, but in the end he denies that the thought experiment could solve the dilemma of benevolence. The conditions of the thought experiment are viewed, by both Nagel and Rawls, as enforcing respect for the separateness of persons. Rawls’s conclusion is evidence that he thinks there is no direct step from the separateness of persons to egalitarianism.

20 Nozick, 33

21 The criticism would be unfair if Nozick interpreted the objection to balancing as a principle for judging actions rather than outcomes, a principle that rules out imposing harms on some for the sake of benefits for others. He does sometimes say that what is objectionable is using or sacrificing one person for the sake of others, but I think that Nozick’s view is that this is objectionable just because the loss suffered by that person is not outweighed by benefits for others. In other words, the objection to balancing is in the first instance concerned with judging the value of outcomes, and it would not establish a moral difference between violating a constraint and not preventing others from violating it.

22 Nagel, Thomas ‘Equality,’ in Nagel, Thomas Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979) 106-27Google Scholar. See esp. 123.

23 Ibid., 125

24 Ibid., 123

25 Ibid., 126

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 123, 126, 127

28 Ibid., 127

29 Ibid.

30 Parfit is puzzled by Henry Sidgwick’s view (Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 520-1, n. 109). Sidgwick believes that the difference between lives is important enough to make egoism a defensible theory of individual rationality. Why does he not also believe that it grounded a requirement of equal distribution? Parfit wishes he could ask Sidgwick this question. Perhaps Sidgwick would say that he sees some connection between the importance of the difference between lives and the view that each person should only be concerned with his or her own life, but he does not see a similar connection with equality. In other words, Sidgwick did not accept the direct claim and did not see any more complicated way of arguing from the separateness of persons to equality.

31 Why do egalitarians look for a deeper level of support for their principles? First, it is easy to confuse the direct claim - the claim that the separateness of persons has the importance that we attribute to it if we think that equality is valuable - with the more ambitious view that the value of equality can be derived from something more basic. Second, some writers seem to believe that a principle of equality in distribution needs to be supported by some independent argument if it is to be reasonably held, although they do not think that a principle telling us to maximize the total of benefits minus harms across all lives requires extra support. Third, some egalitarians wish to argue that egalitarian considerations should outweigh utilitarian consideration. The simple claim that we do value equality, or that we have a special concern with helping the worst off, would be inadequate for this purpose. However, if the egalitarian principle could be viewed as a consequence of the morally appropriate way of thinking about the difference between lives, then its priority would be understandable. In fact, if the egalitarian principle were based on the objection to balancing, or the objection to aggregation, it is difficult to see how we could consistently give even a subordinate role to the utilitarian principle.