Reality of Human Diversity

Rawls argues that if individuals have the same basket of primary goods, resulting inequality is not unjust because individuals must take responsibility for their own preferences. For Rawls, justice should be measured by the resources people have ( means) rather than the happiness or satisfaction they achieve (ends).

Sen counters that this ignores the fundamental diversity of being human. Even if two people have the exact same resources, their divergent physical or social circumstances mean they will achieve very different levels of actual freedom. A person with a parasitic stomach ailment requiring a specific diet is not equivalent to a person choosing to eat only organic food. A bike is a resource, but it's useless to someone who cannot walk. For Sen, resources are meaningless if you lack the capability to convert them into a valued life. 


In practice though, resources are often a zero-sum game. Consider a public school budget. Let's say the average spending for students is around $18,000, and $90,000 per special education student due to specialized staff, transportation, and other individual services. 


Sen offers no ceiling - At what point does the cost of equalizing capabilities diminish the primary goods available to the rest of the community and the actual freedom of a community? If the funding gap is filled by cutting the music teacher or increasing class sizes for 500 students, the actual freedom of the majority has been jeopardized to subsidize conversion needs for the few. And while monetary costs are more measurable, how can one measure the relative impacts, or more abstract capabilities like the “capability for social belonging”?


Further, if a community sacrifices the quality of education for the majority to grant a small minority a capability they ultimately choose not to use (intrinsic value of choice), was that distribution just? Does one have to trust that all individuals in a community will choose to cooperate, or is that an unrealistic expectation similar to the Kingdom of Ends?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more