Justice and Well‐Orderedness: Saving Rawls from Luck Egalitarianism

• Author: Jahel Queralt
• Date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12146
• Published date: 01 December 2016

Justice and Well-Orderedness: Saving

Rawls from Luck Egalitarianism

JAHEL QUERALT

1

Abstract. This paper develops a full account of Rawls’s notion of a well-ordered soci-

ety and uses it to address two luck egalitarian objections to his principles of justice.

The first is an internal criticism which claims that Rawls’s account of justice is better

captured by a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian account. The second is an external

objection according to which,regardless of the alleged inconsistency between Rawls’s

principles and his account of justice, we should reject those principles in favour of a

responsibility-sensitive criterion because it better captures our moral intuitions about

distributive justice.The argument presentedanswers both objections by defendingthe

value of well-orderedness and showing the difficulties of responsibility-sensitive egali-

tarian conceptionsin realizing this ideal.

1. Introduction

One of the main objections to Rawls’s conception of justice is that its principles are

not sensitive enough to individual choice and responsibility. This criticism was first

voiced by some libertarians but has been forcefully restated by some liberal egali-

tarians, known as luck egalitarians, who believe that the notion of responsibility

should be at the core of an egalitarian conception of distributive justice. The luck

egalitarian critique of Rawls’s proposal takes two forms. First, it is presented as an

internal objection according to which a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian criterion

is truer to Rawls’s motivation for developing an egalitarian conception of justice

than the principles defended in A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971, 1999a). Second, the

critique is also formulated as an external objection that claims that, regardless of

the alleged inconsistency between Rawls’s principles and his motivation, we

should reject those in favour of a responsibility-sensitive criterion because it better

1

This paper was written while I was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies

Justitia Amplificata in Frankfurt. Earlier versions of it were presented at the

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, the Universidad de C

ordoba

(Argentina), the Universidad de Palermo (Argentina), the Universidad Aut

onoma de Madrid,

the Universityof Girona, and the V Meetingson Ethics and Political Philosophyin Braga. I thank

these audiences and, in particular, I~

nigo Gonzalez Ricoy, Hugo Seleme, and an anonymous

reviewer forthis journal for many helpful comments.

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C2016 The Author. Ratio JurisV

C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main

Street, Malden 02148, USA.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 29 No. 4 December 2016 (519–534)

captures what egalitarian justice should be about.

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Both versions of the critique

have received considerable attention from liberal egalitarians unsympathetic to the

luck egalitarian project. Some of them have addressed the internal objection argu-

ing that luck egalitarians have a mistaken understanding of Rawls (Freeman 2007;

Scheffler 2003), whereas others have launched a wholesale attack on luck egalitari-

anism in response to the external objection (Anderson 1999; Hinton 2001; Shiffrin

2004; Wolff 1998).

This paper seeks to make a twofold contribution to this body of work. First, it

advances an argument against the luck egalitarian objection that shows the value

of the Rawlsian notion of a well-ordered society and the difficulties luck egalitari-

anism has in realizing it. I will call this argument the well-orderedness argument.

Against the internal objection, the argument allows us to say that given that

Rawls’s concern was to identify principles for a well-ordered society, he had good

reasons for rejecting a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian criterion. In response to

the external version, it claims that the significance of well-orderedness gives us a

reason to prefer Rawls’s proposal to luck egalitarianism. Second, in presenting this

argument, the paper seeks to give a full account of the notion of a well-ordered

society, which has not received the attention that other Rawlsian concepts have

attracted.

The exposition will proceed as follows. The first section offers a brief sketch of

the debate between Rawls and luck egalitarians. The second section explains the

Rawlsian ideal of a well-ordered society and shows its desirability by pointing out

the ways in which it contributes to the achievement of three other values, namely,

stability, equal consideration to all individuals, and autonomy. The third section

looks at the requirements deriving from well-orderedness when we take into

account certain persistent facts of reality. The fourth section examines the difficul-

ties of luck egalitarian conceptions to meet these requirements, and a brief final sec-

tion concludes.

2. The Debate

As many other discussions in Anglo-American political philosophy, the recent

debate on the role of responsibility within egalitarian justice has its origins in

Rawls’s work. In A Theory of Justice he defends a conception called “democratic

equality” that is, to a significant extent, motivated by the intuition that justice

requires to mitigate the unequal effects of social and natural lotteries in people’s

lives (Rawls 1999a, 64). His proposed solution to deal with these inequalities com-

bines a system of fair equality of opportunity, which nullifies the impact of social

background in the distribution of advantages, with the difference principle, which

allows economic inequalities only to the extent that they benefit the worst-off. In

this way, the difference principle mitigates—although it does not nullify—the con-

sequences of the unequal distribution of personal resources.

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Luck egalitarians

share Rawls’s intuition about the unfairness of social and natural inequalities but

they think his proposal falls short of realizing it because the difference principle is

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Arneson (2008,80) clearly distinguishes betweenthe two objections.

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This is the content of Rawls’s second principle of justice, which is subordinated to his first

principleof equal basic liberties.

520 Jahel Queralt

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C2016 The Author. Ratio Juris V

C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Ratio Juris, Vol. 29, No. 4