A Perversion of Justice

STUDENTS in Social Analysis 10 will probably spend Christmas vacation recovering from the ravages of the second course-wide hourly given this week. They will do themselves a favor by forgetting some of what they frantically crammed on Tuesday night.

The expendable part of the Ec 10 material is the portion of the equity unit that deals with Professor of Philosophy John Rawls' conception of fairness, laid out in his book A Theory of Justice. In this unfortunate presentation of this material Ec 10 succeeds only in mauling Rawls and discrediting itself.

Rawls bases his theory of justice on the "Original Position." In this hypothetical situation, people decide before they are born how to organize the society in which they will live. The actors have no idea of the places they will occupy in this society--one might end up a corporate magnate or a homeless person.

Rawls contends that faced with this situation, people would build their society around two principles. Most important, everyone should enjoy all liberties compatible with ensuring the same liberties for everyone else. The second guiding principle dictates that social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions: they must be attached to positions and offices open to all citizens under conditions of equality of opportunity and, second, they should work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

THE last stipulation, also called the Difference Principle, insists that the situation of the poorest members of society be considered when creating a system of justice. It allows inequality of wealth and income, but only if the prosperity of the top can be harnessed to contribute to the well-being of the bottom.

To apply Rawlsian justice to economic redistribution, Ec 10 presents a variation of the following choice on its Unit 3 problem sets and unit tests:

There are 100 people in an economy. In one situation, 99 people earn $100,000 and I person earns $1. The alternative is that all 100 people in the economy can earn $2. In which society would the Rawlsian person want to live?

The correct answer, according to Ec 10, is that citizens would choose to earn $2 instead of suffering any inequality. What lunacy! I would never choose to live under such constraints.

Well John Rawls wouldn't either. The first flaw in the Ec 10 example is that it presents two fundamentally unequal situations. If you do your math, you will notice that the entire social pie in the first alternative is $9,900,001. In the second example, the social pie has mysteriously shrunken to a few crumbs, or $200. The choice is a joke.

Why is Ec 10 afraid to make the two pies the same size? Probably because the option of having everybody in society earn $9,900,001 divided by 100--or $99,000 per person--seems quite reasonable.

THIS crude effort to discredit Rawlsian justice is only laughable. More worrisome is the fact that Ec 10 purports to present Rawls' view without mentioning that it has conveniently omitted important parts of the argument. By using only a choice few of Rawls' basic suppositions, Ec 10 arrives at policy choices that Rawls and most other thinking people would not.

Implicit in the Ec 10 presentation is that Rawlsian justice means measures that would unjustly punish the most advantaged members of society. By presenting the possibility of all members of society getting equal parts of a tiny pie, Ec 10 evokes images of inefficiency and communism.

But A Theory of Justice was created specifically for democratic society. "The difference principle recognizes the need for inequalities in the social and economic order," writes Rawls. The theory fully accepts the inequalities necessary to drive capitalism. It is irresponsible of Ec 10 to insinuate that Rawlsian justice would accept a system of levelling equality so foreign to its own presuppositions.

Section leaders encourage students to object to Rawls' scheme on the grounds that it unwisely compromises efficiency for the sake of equity. It is true that a Rawlsian society does focus on the least well-off and contends that income differentials must be justified. But all the Difference Principle asks is that the inequalities in society be harnessed to provide some benefit to the poor. Rawls' "Justice as Fairness" is not about levelling equality. A more truly Rawlsian policy might be adjusting marginal tax rates on high incomes and channeling the revenue to the less well-off.

Substantial inequality between rich and poor can coexist with Rawls' scheme. True, the Difference Principle would veto an increase in income at the top with zero redistribution to the bottom. But this limitation, in place in many industrial societies, is not exactly bringing capitalism to its knees.

Exaggeration is a useful educational tool. However Ec 10's presentation of Rawlsian distributive justice is not just a case of using an extreme example to illustrate a point. The selective witholding of inconvenient parts of Rawls' assumptions is careless at best and dishonest at worst. If Rawls' ideas are only useful to Ec 10 in a severely mutated form, they should not be used at all.

THE misportrayal of Rawls' "Justice of Fairness" hurts all parties involved. First-year students will graduate from Ec 10 with a flawed concept of an important modern political philosophy. But Ec 10 also suffers. Students who have taken the popular Moral Reasoning course "Justice" or Philosophy 171, both of which treat Rawls in depth, can only become cynical about the Economics Department.

I am not a rabid Ec 10 hater. In fact if the course is taken with a healthy skepticism, I think it can be one of the most valuable offerings at Harvard. But, given that it is the only exposure of many Harvard students to economics, it has an added responsibility to present fairly all sides of the issues with which it deals.