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Desert and Wages*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Owen McLeod
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Women tend to earn less than their male colleagues. Furthermore, women tend to earn less than men who hold jobs that are nominally different but relevantly similar to their own. Advocates of ‘comparable worth’ protest these facts. Their protest sometimes takes this form: Those differences in pay between men and women are undeserved. The argument for this claim is simple. Some facts are relevant to the wage one deserves for performing a given job; some are not. In the vast majority of cases, the argument continues, gender is not relevant to the wage one deserves; relevant are, say, the skill, responsibility, and working conditions required by the job. When jobs are comparable with respect to these facts, those who work in them deserve equal pay. Therefore, women and men who work the very same jobs deserve equal pay; likewise for women and men whose jobs are nominally different but relevantly similar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , July 1996 , pp. 205 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was presented to an audience at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I am grateful to members of that audience for their comments. I am especially grateful to Fred Feldman for his extensive comments on this paper, and for discussion on this and other desert-related topics. Thanks also to Jack Hanson for comments, kindness, and much else besides.

References

1 For a book-length version of this argument, see Soltan, K. E., The Causal Theory of Justice, Berkeley, 1987Google Scholar. For more discussion, see also England, Paula, Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence, New York, 1992Google Scholar; and Gold, Michael, A Dialogue on Comparable Worth, Ithaca, 1983Google Scholar.

2 A full-blown theory of desert of wages would include more than a list of bases for desert. I suspect that it would have to contain some principles about how to rank those bases in different circumstances, how to combine them in such a way as to represent a worker's ‘desert-level’, and how to map that level with a more or less specific wage. Whether this can actually be done is not something I address in this paper.

3 Why say that wages are deserved for contracted work? Consider the following case. While you are away on vacation, I take it upon myself, without your ever having asked me, to tend to your lawn and garden. On your return, I present myself at your doorstep and ask for payment. You might choose to reward me for what I have done, but to say that this reward is a wage is counterintuitive. The reason, I suggest, is that the work I have done was not done under contract. Note also that on my understanding of wages, the money that self-employed people pay themselves is not a wage. This is because people cannot, I presume, make contracts with themselves. (I do not insist on this, and the point does not affect the paper's arguments.)

4 I have in mind the following sort of case. Suppose I am hit by a speeding car. I am knocked unconscious. My injuries will kill me unless I receive immediate emergency surgery. Fortunately, a surgeon witnesses the accident and performs the requisite surgery. The operation succeeds, and I survive. A week later I receive a bill from the surgeon for services rendered. The surgeon's argument is that there was an ‘implicit’ or ‘quasi-contract’: if I had been able to consent to the surgery, I would have done so. If so, then any payment I make to the surgeon should count as a wage. For a case involving precisely these facts, see Cotnam v. Wisdom, Supreme Court of Arkansas, 15 July 1907. My thanks to Thomas Kearns for this and other helpful references.

5 Feinberg, Joel, Social Philosophy, Englewood Cliffs, 1973, p. 117Google Scholar. Useful discussions of the effort theory can be found also in Miller, David, Social Justice, Oxford, 1976, pp. 103 and 109–10Google Scholar; and in Dick, James, ‘How to Justify a Distribution of Earnings’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, iv (1975), 259–60Google Scholar.

6 Sadurski, Wojceich, Giving Desert its Due, Dordrecht, 1985, p. 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Miller, , Social Justice, p. 109Google Scholar, offers (but does not endorse) a version of this argument for the effort theory: ‘The argument in its favor is usually expressed as follows: a man can deserve reward only for what it is within his power to do. If two men try equally hard, and work for an equally long time, they deserve equal remuneration even if one of them, by virtue of superior ability, manages to produce more goods, or goods of a better quality’ Another version of this argument is suggested by the following story, told by Slote, Michael, ‘Desert, Consent, and Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, ii (1973), 327–8Google Scholar: ‘Imagine…that a certain woman has lost a book and two friends of hers come by and volunteer to help her find it. The friends make equally conscientious, energetic, and intelligent efforts to find the book, and one of them succeeds in finding it and returning it to the woman who lost it. One might well wonder about such a case whether the woman who actually found the book deserves more (by way of gratitude or reward) from the friend who lost the book than does the woman who tried equally hard but failed to find the book. And this is a difficult question…We are, after all, imagining that…her failure to find the book can be attributed to “bad luck” or “accident”. And can greater desert…arise through mere luck or accident?’ Slote is talking about desert of gratitude here, but he tells this story in an attempt to shed light on the question of ‘whether an ideally just society … would reward people (workers) in accordance with their actual success in contributing to society or in accordance with their conscientious efforts to con-tribute to society’, 329. Slote's reaction to the argument: ‘It is hard to know what to say’, ibid.

8 This is, e.g., Julian Lamont's impression. In ‘The Concept of Desert in Distributive Justice’, Philosophical Quarterly, xliv (1994), 57Google Scholar, Lamont writes: ‘Among those who think that desert should play some role in determining income distribution, one of the long-standing debates has been between those who think “effort” should be the desert-basis and those who think “productivity” should be’.

9 Miller, , Social Justice, p. 103Google Scholar.

10 Feinberg, , Social Philosophy, p. 114Google Scholar.

11 Soltan, p. 147.

12 It is worth noting that Galston, William, Justice and the Human Good, Chicago, 1980, p. 201Google Scholar, advocates what he calls a ‘contribution’ theory of desert of wages, but he understands the notion of contribution very broadly. On Galston's view, ‘Contribution to production has five major components: sacrifice, duration, effort, productivity, and quality’. But Galston's inclusion of ‘effort’ and ‘sacrifice’ makes his theory a hybrid of effort, compensation, and contribution theories. Thus, I think he misleads by calling it a ‘contribution’ theory.

13 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice, Oxford, 1983, p. 108Google Scholar. Walzer does not accept this theory, writing: ‘this is to misunderstand the meaning of desert. Unless there are standards of worth independent of what people want (and are willing to buy) at this or that moment in time, there can be no deservingness at all. We would never know what a person deserved until we saw what he had gotten. And that can't be right.’ Walzer's objection is obscure. At any rate, it is not clear why he thinks that if a market value theory of desert of wages were true, then we would not know what wage a person deserves until he or she actually received it. For, as I see it, the market value theory implies no such thing. Even if the worker is never paid, the market price of the service supplied is, in principle, determinable; so, then, is the wage.

14 Miller, David, Market, State, and Community, Oxford, 1989, pp. 161–2Google Scholar.

15 Several authors seem to accept some version of the market value theory. See, e.g., Kelso, Louis and Adler, Mortimer J., The Capitalist Manifesto, New York, 1958, pp. 52–86Google Scholar; Miller, David, Market, State, and Community, pp. 151–74(note that Miller places an important ‘socialist’ spin on the theory)Google Scholar; Young, Robert, ‘Egalitarianism and Personal Desert’, Ethics, cii (1992), 330Google Scholar. In Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical, Baltimore, 1987, p. 246Google Scholar, economists R. D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick claim that neo-classical economic theory is committed to the idea that in a free market ‘each gets his or her just deserts’. For an old but impressive criticism of the market value theory of desert of wages, see Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., Indianapolis, 1981, pp. 287–90Google Scholar. For further reflections on the morality of a free market, see Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement, Oxford, 1986, pp. 83–112Google Scholar.

16 Young, 330. In fairness to Young, he finishes this sentence with: ‘but to the very great extent that perfect competition does not hold sway there can be very little comfort for supporters of desert-based distributions that in the theoretical model it does’.

17 Wolff and Resnick, p. 123. As is well known, neo-classical economists use these assumptions to derive theoretically interesting results – e.g., that such a market will be Pareto optimal.

18 Dick, 264.

19 See Feinberg's appendix to ‘Justice and Personal Desert’, reprinted in his Doing and Deserving, Princeton, 1970, p. 94.

20 Ibid., pp. 92–3.

21 Ibid., pp. 74 and 75.

22 Sher, George, Desert, Princeton, 1987, p. 102Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 106.

24 Ibid., p. 107.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 108.

28 Two important caveats. First, I do not view possession of any of these bases as sufficient for deserving a wage – or anything else. I view them as bases for prima-facie desert. Second, I accept what many authors have noted: namely, that need and entitlement are distinct from desert. What I do not accept is that need and entitlement are therefore not bases for desert. For a detailed discussion of these and many other desert-related topics, see my On Being Deserving, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1995Google Scholar.

29 See note 19.

30 Note that Feinberg, , ‘Justice and Personal Desert’, p. 62Google Scholar, does not claim ‘taxonomic precision or completeness’ for this list.

31 Ibid., p. 61.

32 Miller, , Market, State, and Community, p. 157Google Scholar.

33 Young, 319.

34 A survey of different sorts of job evaluation schemes can be found in England, pp. 189–224.

35 I hope readers will understand that I am not taking sides in the comparable worth debate (though, for the record, I am with those who advocate it). I am merely suggesting that the debate needs to be broadened to include what I have argued to be the proper conception of desert of wages. My thanks to David Waller for convincing me to make this point.