Dr.

Andrea Sangiovanni
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY II : THEORIES OF JUSTICE
25/03/13
Does Dworkin successfully reconcile the demand to treat
everyone with equal concern and the expectation that
everyone bear consequential responsibility for their
ambitions?
Dworkin creates a theoretical system under which people are treated with an
equal, suitable level of concern and they are allowed to reap sufcient rewards from their
ambition, alongside being forced to take on the relevant risk. There are objections to the
implementation of the system but I also wish to show how these can be overcome using
Dworkins system of manufacturing option luck out of brute luck using the mechanism
of insurance policies and in turn, their conversion to taxation.
First, I wish to cover the problem that occurs when trying to marry equal concern
for all with an attempt to make people responsible for the benets and costs of their
actions and preferences. Let us take the most simple system under which everyone is
treated with equal concern, as a necessary consequence of them being a member of a
hypothetical society. After we distribute the goods in society (using any system) one of
the members of society decides she wishes to take a gamble, she plants seeds in an
untested eld and invests her labour into that eld at the neglect of other areas of
production. If the crop fails she will be left in a position of less wealth than those around
her, which will impact both her welfare and her quantity of resources. If we treat her
with equal concern here then we shall have to reimburse her for the loss, for fear that
otherwise she would lack the capacity to engage in society on an equal footing. Elizabeth
Anderson puts forward the idea that we must always treat people with sufcient concern
to stop that falling into oppressive social relations
1
. However, as we have seen in the
1
Anderson, Elizabeth S. (1999). What is the point of equality? Ethics 109 (2):316.
above example, this rule can cause problems that Anderson fails to resolve. Shouldnt the
agent in the example be forced to burden at least some of the cost her risk, since her
being reimbursed will be the denial of resources (and welfare) to others in the society?
There is another problem with Andersons system, but it concerns more practical
implications. In this area of discussion there is a temptation to talk only in terms of
theoretical terms and ideals situations but if an ideal necessarily entails a practical
consequence then it is to be included within that theoretical. Under a system like
Andersons, where people who makes poor decisions do not take a real risk, the social
system will warp because of this incentive. Even if we exclude money from the
discussion, there will be a large welfare incentive for each person to take risks; because
they know that the government will give them back their loses. This would be the same as
all the farmers planting their crops on untested soil which would leave the group as a
whole massively exposed to bad luck, especially since the must attractive risks would be
the ones with the highest pay offs. A supporter of Anderson may defend that not all these
risks would go bad at one time, but on the contrary, it would be obvious to people that a
certain type of gamble would be the most lucrative if the cost of failure was zero.
Eventually this type of gamble would result in a loss; a large swathe of the population
would demand to be compensated but there simply would not be the resources to do so.
How does Dworkin resolve this problem, without abandoning equal concern for
everyone? Conversely, he lets go of equal concern as a guiding axiom, and substitutes it
with an envy-freeness test, but he leaves out the Pareto efciency test. While others have
tried to form systems of redistribution, Dworkin wants to ask how we should start our
society, this makes sense for building a theoretical framework for the beginning and
evolution of a group of people. He imagines a group washed up on a island and he
assumes that they will wish to partition the property so that nobody envies another
persons bundle of resources (envy-freeness.)
2
Here Dworkin puts a foot wrong; he
acknowledges that there are states that are envy free; such as everyone having equal
2
Dworkin, Ronald (1981). What is equality? Part 2: Equality of resources. Philosophy and Public
Affairs 10 (4):285.
bundles, but that they are not best
3
. Instead of trying to resolve this he simple calls for a
better option to be chosen, this is where Dworkin proposes the auction. He justies that
an auction will mean that everybody gets a set of resources that is appropriate to her
preferences and is envy free. This is identical to introducing the Pareto test common in
economics, in the way that Hal Varian does
4
. A system is Pareto efcient if and only if
there is no way to increase an agents bundle of goods without another agent having less
in their bundle
5
. This now justies the auction, because if each person is given the same
purchasing power, any system that emerges will have to be envy free. It will also be
Pareto efcient because agents are able to buy a bundle of resources that maximizes their
own wealth; bundles that either are appropriate to their preference or appropriate to
each other (e.g. arable land, seeds and farming equipment or water source, rope and a
bucket.)
However, suppose a member of the island has a tree fall on them and they are
crippled; how are we to treat this victim of brute luck? Well, Dworkin suggests that
anyone could have bought insurance against brute luck, and so there was a choice when
they didnt buy the insurance, therefore it is option luck. Its also important to note that
anyone who preferred not to buy the insurance would have had more resources with
which to buy other goods at the initial auction. Also Dworkin importantly allows
everyone to purchase hypothetical insurance under the veil of ignorance against them
being handicapped or against them being low skilled
6
. The most important part is that
Dworkin will let the insurance companies take an mean average of to what degree people
would insure against what things, and then compel that of all islanders. This is a way of
turning insurance premiums into taxation
7
. One may object that its not Pareto efcient
to take income tax off a richer person and hand it to someone who is handicapped, since
3
Dworkin, Ronald (1981). What is equality? Part 2: Equality of resources. Philosophy and Public
Affairs 10 (4):286.
4
Varian, Hal R. (1975). Distributive justice, welfare economics, and the theory of fairness.
Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (3):233-4.
5
Barr, Nicholas. (2012). Economics of the Welfare States. Oxford University Press (5): 43-8.
6
Dworkin, Ronald (1981). What is equality? Part 2: Equality of resources. Philosophy and Public
Affairs 10 (4):296-304.
7
Dworkin, Ronald (1981). What is equality? Part 2: Equality of resources. Philosophy and Public
Affairs 10 (4):323-5.
the richer person has become less well off. The answer here is that the resources are
redistributed before they belong to the more well off person, it is not a necessary
condition of production that the producer owns all the manufactured goods. It can be
Pareto efcient as long as the producers portion of the manufactured good is equal in
value to their input and labour.
Does this fulll the requirement for equal concern now? Well, in a twisted way,
Dworkins system did from the start; there was no concern for anyone; which is
fundamentally equal. However, with a progressive income tax system in place to
compensate for brute luck there is a baseline created under which no one can fall. One
could argue that under Dworkins system, handicapped people may not be sufciently
compensated but I would reply that there is no proper compensation for a handicap.
This was a major problem for Anderson; we would have to go on compensating someone
until they could engage with society, even if the cost was massively disproportionate
because there was no maximum. To conclude; if we limit our society to just the castaways
in Dworkins example then they will all be treated with equal concern, Dworkin resolves
the problem for the small group of immigrants. His style is only objectionable without
the premiums as tax conversation, because this ensures that nobody can fall below a
social agreed level due to brute luck (also, the level moves upwards as the society
becomes more prosperous). The interesting thing is that if a copy of Andersons ideas
ever washed up on the shores of the islands and the inhabitants came to the conclusion
that she was right all along, then all that would happen would be that the lower level to
which one could sink would be raised and the requirement for co-insurance (i.e. excess
charges) would be dropped.