‹ Brettschneider Reading Group, Chapter 4 •
The expensive tastes objection constitutes a familiar argument against egalitarian (and other) theories of distributive justice that require redistribution of resources from those whose aims are relatively cheap to pursue to those whose aims are relatively expensive to pursue just in virtue of the difference in the costs of pursuit. It’s based quite straightforwardly on the common intuition that we simply ought not to endorse such redistributions. Often, the expensive tastes objection is seen as sufficient by itself to ground the rejection of those theories of distributive justice that are vulnerable to it.
Because of this, and because—as I argue in first half of the paper attached to this post—it turns out to be crucial even to objections which don’t explicitly appeal to it, the intuition in question (call it ‘the expensive tastes intuition’) is hugely important in debates about the ‘currency of egalitarian justice’. Yet it’s surely somewhat troubling that so central a plank in the case against the kinds of theories that are vulnerable to the expensive tastes objection should rest on one bare intuition—and one about societal arrangements with which we’re utterly unacquainted, at that.
I think that it is. Nevertheless, I share the intuition. So, in the second half of the paper, I try to uncover a plausible basis for it. To this end, I argue that what underlies the appeal of the metrics that render a distributive theory vulnerable to the expensive tastes objection—namely ‘distributive subjectivism’, which cedes authority in the assessment of what is good for individuals to the individuals themselves—can’t ultimately perform the task for which it is intended. The task for which is it is intended is that of avoiding appeals to values not shared by all in the justification of our political arrangements: the task of attaining the liberal ideal of legitimacy. I argue, however, that claims to redistribution in putative cases of expensive taste cannot, on subjectivist metrics, ultimately be insulated from appeals to individuals’ own values. So, distributive subjectivism is unacceptable to liberals seeking legitimate principles of justice.
I end by suggesting that the argument I’ve offered can be viewed as the theoretical support for the expensive tastes intuition, enabling that intuition to bear the weight that’s placed upon it. So, the expensive tastes objection is vindicated.
The PDF of the paper, for those who don’t want to subject themselves to my peculiar accent, is here.
Zofia Stemplowska’s comments are here (Zofia’s comments are now up — SCM).
I should mention that I recorded the podcast for this symposium before I presented the paper at the Manchester Workshop in Political Theory last month. This, and no other reason, is why I haven’t incorporated into the version I post here the many helpful suggestions and revisions that were recommended to me by the participants there.
Many thanks to Zofia for her discussion and to Simon May for organising everything. Thanks also to Nat Stein for loaning me his agreeable baritone for the quotations in my podcast.
I look forward to reading all of your comments, and appreciate your making the time to offer them.
Distributive Subjectivism, Liberal Neutrality, and the Expensive Tastes Intuition: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadTags: distributive justice, egalitarianism, equality, expensive tastes, political philosophy
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1 - Monday, 3 November 2008 at 3:06 am
Jonathan Quong
I think this is a really interesting topic, and both Thomas’s paper and Zofia’s comment do a terrific job of bringing more clarity and precision to a tricky subject.
In her comment on Thomas’s paper, Zofia suggests (tentatively) that liberal neutrality might, contra Thomas’s argument, actually favour a restricted form of distributive subjectivism (DS). Zofia suggests that in cases of reasonable disagreement, when one person’s conception of the good is more expensive than another’s, compensating the person with the more expensive conception might be justifiable according to liberal neutrality since the request for compensation looks reasonable, and need not presuppose a ‘tick addict’ view. Rather, we may want to compensate the person with the more expensive conception since their claim arises from a reasonable view about value, and appeals to a plausible conception of equality. I think Zofia’s argument here is very persuasive, but since I am generally sympathetic to the position Thomas presents in his paper, I thought I would try to imagine what Thomas (or anyone else who opposes DS) might say in reply.
Let’s say X has the reasonable but more expensive conception, and Y has the reasonable but cheaper conception. Why should X get more than an equal share of resources? Consider things from X’s point of view, that is, consider things from their perspective on value. I think we have to assume that under an equal distribution of resources X would rather retain his conception of the good, that is, he wouldn’t swap for Y’s conception. So judged from his own conception of value X cannot complain that he is worse off than Y under an equal distribution of resources. So in order to motivate the thought that X is entitled to extra resources we must adopt some impersonal (or intersubjective) perspective on value. What perspective is this? Zofia suggests, I think, that it should be something that provides a currency for measuring equal opportunity to lead valuable lives. How does this perspective yield the judgement that we should give extra resources to X? First, it could be because this impersonal or intersubjective perspective tells us that when two people (reasonably) disagree about value, we should try to satisfy their goals or preferences equally. But then, it seems to me, we are back to the idea that naked preference or goal satisfaction has moral weight, and we know that Thomas rejects this position for good Scanlonian reasons. Second, it might be because the impersonal or intersubjective perspective tells us that there are a plurality of objectively valuable ways to live, and there is some objective scale of comparison between these valuable forms of life such that we can know when X and Y are realizing equally valuable amounts of their respective conceptions (and that the achievement of this will require giving more resources to X than to Y). X would thus say to Y:
“I adhere to an objectively valuable plan of life that realizes value Vx, and you adhere to an objectively valuable plan of life that realizes a different value, Vy. There is also some objective scale of comparison for these two values whereby we can know that we will achieve equal amounts of value if I am given 20 units of resources to pursue Vx and you are given 12 units of resources to pursue Vy. I am thus entitled to extra resources for reasons that are grounded in an objectively correct ontology and scale of value, coupled with our shared assumption that each person should be able to lead an equally valuable life.”
This argument sounds pretty controversial to me, one that I think could be reasonably rejected as a sound basis for claims of social justice. I think there are a number of good replies availble to Y. Here’s one:
“Look here X, even if your claims about the ontology and scale of value were correct (something I can reasonably deny), there’s another problem with your claim. We aren’t each entitled to lead equally valuable lives, we are only each entitled to an equal opportunity to lead valuable lives. Now since you concede that my preferred value, Vy, is indeed a genuine value, then when we are given equal shares of resources you cannot complain that we have been given unequal opportunities to lead valuable lives since you could have realized the same amount of value as me by choosing to pursue Vy. So why should I compensate your pursuit of the more expensive value Vx? It cannot be because you must pursue Vx to lead a valuable life since you have already conceded that an equal amount of value can be realized more cheaply by pursuing Vy. So either your claim is grounded in your mere preference for Vx, something which Scanlon and Porter claim cannot ground moral claims, or else it is grounded in some unreasonable claim about value, for example, that you are entitled to achieve whatever values you most prefer at the expense of others.”
Of course X might reply that their claim for compensation is grounded entirely in the fact that their more expensive conception of the good is unchosen and it would be costly (and unfair) to school them out of it at this point in their life, but that seems to me to be a separate issue.
I’m not saying that the reply I’ve put in the mouth of Y here is decisive, and I can see that there are further arguments available to the proponent of restricted DS, but I think things look difficult for restricted DS at this point. I’m curious to know whether Thomas thinks I’ve gone in the right direction here, or whether he thinks there is some alternative and superior way of responding to Zofia’s proposal regarding restricted DS?
2 - Monday, 3 November 2008 at 10:14 am
Zofia Stemplowska
I don’t wish to exclude Thomas from the conversation but Jonathan’s points are great and I wondered what poor X is left with to respond to Y. I think that X can try to offer the following two responses to Y:
(1) It is true that your preferred value, Vy, is a genuine (reasonable) value but you must also admit that my value, Vx, is also a genuine value. We can realise the same amount of value if we both pursue Vy but why decree that resources be distributed to allow us only the equal opportunity to pursue Vy? I take it that it is your concern for efficiency, Y, that is driving this proposal? And isn’t your concern for efficiency privileging one conception of the good over the other (though perhaps that’s for the best)?
(2) While I accept, Y, that your value is a genuine value in the sense that I cannot label it as unreasonable, remember that we disagree about what is of value. I don’t actually think that pursuing Vy leads to a valuable life (just as you do not think that pursuing Vx leads to a valuable life). All I am demanding is resources to realise the value that I reasonably believe is important (just as you have such resources). This does not open me to the charge that I care about naked preferences because you have already admitted that it is reasonable for me to think that pursuing x will realise value.
3 - Monday, 3 November 2008 at 10:44 am
Thomas Porter
First, let me thank Zofia for her insightful summary and thought-provoking comments. I’d like to restrict the scope of this first reply to them alone; I’ll turn to Jon’s comment and Zofia’s reply to Jon afterwards. I think my brain will explode if I try to deal with them all in one go. I’d furthermore like to ignore, for now, Zofia’s suggestion that satisfying brute tastes might matter simply because people have them. I’m don’t think that I have a satisfactory response to that suggestion at present, so I hope you’ll forgive me for concentrating on issues of which I have (I hope) a better grasp.
So. The discussion of brute tastes out of the way, Zofia suggests in her response that we don’t need to appeal to any principle of liberal neutrality in order to explain why claims to resources based on a certain range of values can be rejected. We can simply discount the justification as unreasonable “in the light of an objectivist metric of welfare” (p. 3). So, we should reject what Zofia calls ‘unconstrained distributive subjectivism’ (which treats all assertions about what is of value as equivalent and equally valid) because it is too accommodating of unreasonableness.
I agree with Zofia that we can reject such justifications as unreasonable. I have a small reservation about the explanation that she offers, however. Zofia connects unreasonableness to objectivism about welfare in such a way as to suggest that the objectivism determines the unreasonableness. That is: we can establish independently that “some conceptions of the good [are] objectively less good than others” (p. 3), and then we can appeal to this fact in order to discount some justifications (which draw on the least good conceptions of the good) as unreasonable. My reservation is this. I agree that we can establish that some conceptions of the good are objectively less good than others, but I think that we can establish that because we can establish that they are unreasonable, rather than independently. Unreasonableness is itself what makes a conception of the good objectively less good than others. They’re unreasonable because they preclude the approach to others, and in particular to justifying one’s actions to others, that is characteristic of reasonableness. It’s a small point, of course, but I think that it has an importance which I’ll try to explain in a moment.
Let me turn now to Zofia’s main argument. She claims that liberal neutrality may in fact (and in contrast to my view) be supportive of constrained distributive subjectivism. As she points out, a person can’t dismiss another’s views about what is of value as unreasonable once we’ve put unreasonable values to the side. Can Mario, then, reasonably dismiss Luigi’s claim to resources based upon Luigi’s ex hypothesi reasonable conception of the good? Zofia thinks not: Mario can’t characterise Luigi’s claim as manifestly mistaken or held against the burden of evidence; nor can he see it as a demand that only a selfish person could make. And we’ve already accepted that we should redistribute resources so as to make lives equally valuable.
Now, both Zofia and I are, I think, agreed that we can reasonably dismiss such claims construed as appeals to the value of satisfying preferences as such. And we’re also agreed that the alternative is to construe the claims as appeals to the values which structure the relevant individuals’ conceptions of the good. So the position is this: I argue that we can reasonably dismiss such claims when they are construed in this alternative way, even though the conceptions of the good underlying them are reasonable. Zofia says that the very reasonableness of those conceptions of the good, though others may (reasonably) reject them, makes it unreasonable to reject claims to resources based upon them. So, who’s right?
Note that the debate about distributive subjectivism is one part of the wider debate about what to do in the face of the fact that people reasonably disagree on conceptions of the good. Distributive subjectivism is a thesis about how, from the political point of view, we should conceive of what’s good for people, given that fact. On my reading, liberals aspire to avoid conceiving politically of what’s good for people by appeal to values that a reasonable person may reject. Zofia’s stance on distributive subjectivism implies that she disagrees: she is prepared to countenance a political conception of individual good (as manifested in the granting of an individual’s claims to more resources) in terms of values that reasonable people may reject (i.e. the values which structure the claimant’s own conception of the good).
But my reading, it seems to me, is obligatory for justificatory liberals. In response to the fact of pluralism (i.e. not reasonable pluralism, but pluralism simpliciter), justificatory liberals make two claims: first, that we shouldn’t be concerned if unreasonable people, in virtue of their unreasonableness, actually reject some (proffered) justification of state action; and second, that we should be concerned if reasonable people could reject the (proffered) justification of state action. Zofia effectively rejects the second claim, and substitutes instead the idea that we should be concerned only if no reasonable person could accept the (proffered) justification of state action. But this is to abandon the idea that state action must be justified to each (reasonable) person, where to be justified to a reasonable person involves drawing on values that that person reasonably accepts. A justification may meet Zofia’s condition (it’s not such that no reasonable person could accept it) without meeting the more stringent condition that no reasonable person could reject it. Only the latter condition captures the fundamental conception of liberal neutrality that justificatory liberals endorse.
Earlier I said that my reservation about Zofia’s discussion of unreasonable conceptions of the good was important. I’m in a position now to try to explain why. Suppose that we accept the account that I found in Zofia’s discussion, according to which the objective badness of some conceptions of the good can be established before we go on to dismiss them as unreasonable precisely because of that fact. This would explain the first of the justificatory liberal’s claims that I identified. But it would tend to make the second of the two claims seem somewhat mysterious. Why should we adhere to such a stringent condition on justifications of state action once all justifications in terms of objectively bad values are eliminated? Any justification meeting Zofia’s condition passes, ex hypothesi, some threshold of objective goodness, and presumably reasonableness has nothing more to say on the matter—since it was (exhaustively) determined by the independently identified objective goodness/badness distinction.
If, by contrast, we accept the account which I offered as an alternative, according to which the rejection of objectively bad conceptions of the good is founded in their unreasonableness—in the fact that they preclude the approach to others, and in particular to justifying one’s actions to others, that is characteristic of reasonableness—then both of the justificatory liberal’s two claims are intelligible in terms of that same conception of reasonableness. What it is, in part, to be reasonable is to take an approach to others which involves justifying one’s actions in terms that no one could reasonably reject. It’s for that reason that we can dismiss some conceptions out of hand: they preclude the reasonable approach. And it’s also for that reason, of course, that we aim to meet the stringent condition rather than the weaker one that Zofia seems to endorse.
4 - Monday, 3 November 2008 at 11:27 am
Thomas Porter
Jon, thank you for stepping in so quickly and with such helpful thoughts to lead my paper out of the no-comments desert. Let me start by saying that I wholeheartedly endorse your characterisation of the position in which X finds himself: the risk of giving weight to naked preference-satisfaction on one side and of reasonably-rejectable value claims on the other forces X to attempt something like the objectivist justification of his claim to extra resources that you describe.
As you can see from my comment above, my response to Zofia relies on the thought that the justificatory liberal conception of justification to all implies that a successful justification draws upon values that a reasonable person reasonably accepts. I don’t really consider the possibility that Zofia raises, namely that justification to all implies only justification in terms of values that a reasonable person could hold. The reply that you place in Y’s mouth is an objection to a constrained distributive subjectivism which is founded on that alternative view about justification to all.
This seems to me to be a very effective reply because the natural objection to it involves arguing that there’s no reason that our opportunities should be calibrated so as to make fulfilment of inexpensive conceptions (such as Y’s) more within reach than the fulfilment of expensive conceptions (such as X’s). For surely that arbitrarily favours those who happen to have the inexpensive conceptions? Yet this natural objection (and I take Zofia’s first suggestion as to what X might say to be a form of this) is unavailable to someone who endorses the alternative view about justification to all: so long as the justification is in terms of some set of values that a reasonable person could hold—and Y’s values constitute one such set—then there can be no complaint. That’s the whole point. The obvious move is to return to the more stringent, Scanlonian conception of justification to all; but in that case constrained distributive subjectivism gets ruled out on the original grounds.
What about Zofia’s second suggestion as to what X might say? The essence of this suggestion, it seems to me, is as follows. Since X reasonably adheres to Vx, it would be unreasonable for everyone else to refuse him the resources to realise Vx to the same degree that Y can realise Vy. That suggests that the granting of extra resources to X can be justified to all. But how? The only available explanation is that X reasonably adheres to Vx. But on Zofia’s view about justification, this is no reason to reject a justification in terms of Vy which denies X’s claim. And on my view about justification, it’s no reason to grant X’s claim in the first place. So, I don’t think that this second suggestion is going to work.
5 - Wednesday, 5 November 2008 at 6:13 pm
Jonathan Quong
I thought I would have a go at responding to Zofia’s two replies developed in response to my objection to her constrained DS. I won’t take up Thomas’s position on these replies since Thomas deploys a distinction between different forms of public justification and believes that Zofia’s argument depends upon adopting a particular (and less plausible) form. I’m not sure Thomas is right about this characterization of Zofia’s argument, but I’ll let Zofia respond to Thomas, and I’ll try to respond to Zofia without employing Thomas’s distinction.
Regarding Zofia’s (1). I think the appropriate response is to say that there is nothing inegalitarian about the argument I put in the mouth of Y. If resources are distributed equally then both X and Y have equal opportunity to realize either value, Vx or Vy. Efficiency is not being prioritized over justice: an equal distribution of resources leaves each person with the same ex ante opportunity to realize either value, so justice is preserved, not compromised by any concern with efficiency.
Giving an answer to (2) is more difficult, but I think there is an answer available. The argument which Zofia puts in the mouth of X in (2) entails that X and Y do not believe that each other’s doctrine do realize any real value, even if they accept each other’s doctrines as reasonable. X then says, ‘given our reasonable disagreement, why should you get the resources that will allow you to realize your value where the resources I get won’t be sufficient for me to realize mine?’. This seems a powerful argument, but I think it rests on an implicit premise that is problematic. That premise is that X can know (at least in principle) how much resources each of them need to equally realize their respective conceptions of the good without relying on the idea of naked preference or goal satisfaction. X, by stipulation, does not believe that Y’s conception delivers any real value, so how is X calibrating what equality requires with regard to the distribution of resources? It seems to me X must think something like, ‘since there is no real value in the conception that Y pursues, the only way to measure whether we are being equally treated is to ensure that X is given the resources necessary to satisfy his (valueless) goals or preferences to the same extent that I am able to satisfy my (genuinely valuable) goals or preferences’. But then we are back to naked preference/goal satisfaction and we have, for the purposes of our discussion so far, been accepting Thomas’s rejection of that position.
I think the basic dilemma that restricted DS faces is this. One the one hand, if we accept the premise that both parties pursue conceptions that have genuine value and are capable (in principle) of being compared in terms of the amount of value realized, then there is nothing inegalitarian about distributing resources equally since this provides each person with the same ex ante opportunity to realize the same amount of value. If, on the other hand, we suppose that one or more of the parties is not pursuing a conception that has any real value, then the only way to justify why resources should be distributed in a manner that helps each person realize their conception to the same extent would be to appeal to preference/goal satisfaction. My two responses to Zofia reflect the two sides of this dilemma.
There is, however, a third response available to the defender of restricted DS. The defender of restricted DS could endorse radical value pluralism, and assert that X and Y each pursue conceptions of genuine value, but that these conceptions are incommensurable or incomparable. There are, however, two obvious problems with this move. First, the assertion of radical value pluralism is inconsistent with political liberalism’s stated aim of remaining agnostic with regard to ontological or metaethical propositions about the nature of value. Second, setting the political liberal objection aside, once we declare that the two conceptions are each genuinely valuable but are also incomparable, then we have no viable metric which might justify why one person requires more resources than another to pursue their chosen conception since we lack any way of knowing whether one person is realizing their conception to a greater or lesser extent than the other.
So I’m provisionally sticking with my rejection of restricted DS, though I’m sure Zofia has one or two more ingenious replies up her sleeve!