Social Inequality

IN MODERN political economy two concepts have been prominent, liberty and equality. They receive nearly identical ranking in importance to community life in the American Declaration of Independence. There, we are told, human beings are “created equal” and possess “certain unalienable rights; among these … are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” A certain kind of equality and a certain kind of liberty are supposedly due everyone, with government instituted so as to secure those equal rights.

Critics point out that the equal possession and protection of the rights in question—especially the liberty to acquire and hold property—engender great unfairness or injustice in human communities. Those born into unfavorable social and economic circumstances—the poor, the ailing, and the meagerly educated—are far less free than those born fortunate. Such socioeconomic inequality, the critics argue, is a major failing of this political tradition.

So, modern (as distinct from classical) liberals and social democrats argue that the sovereignty of each individual is vital, but first everyone needs to be socially and economically equal. From thinkers like the German neo-Marxist Jurgen Habermas to the American legal theorist Ronald Dworkin (of New York University and the University of Oxford School of Law), not to mention radical egalitarians like Kai Nielsen (of the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) and the more moderate ones such as James P. Sterba (Notre Dame University), the assurance is that yes, liberty—individ-ual rights, personal sovereignty or autonomy—is vital, but only if people start from the same circumstances in their lives and are guaranteed fairness as they make their way through life.

Defenders of the classical liberal stance claim that the qualification ruins the thing being qualified. Guaranteeing an equal start for everyone, let alone a fair journey, is impossible because any effort to establish such fairness or equality must involve massive unfairness and inequality of power over others.

The late Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick argued this view with his Wilt Chamberlain example in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Even in a system of total economic equality, the choice millions make to spend their resources on viewing Chamber-lain's basketball virtuosity would involve transfers of enormous, vastly unequal wealth to him (and to similarly favored people), which then would have to be confiscated so as to reestablish economic equality. This, in turn, would involve a government with vastly unequal power to those whose wealth it would equalize.

People aren’t born with equal health, with parents of equal socioeconomic position, with equal willingness to work hard, or with looks that are equally attractive to others, so all this would have to be radically and repeatedly adjusted, requiring massive force, since few [Page 988]would volunteer to give up their advantages, minor or major. Unfairness would prevail, and this would need to be eliminated. The power to impose all this, critics of the egalitarian stance argue, would constitute massive and insidious inequality and unfairness.

One way to resolve this dispute may be that the imposition of socioeconomic inequalities by the legal system, and the authorities administering needs, be systematically removed from a country, while full socioeconomic equality must be given up as a goal of public policy. The remaining inequalities would be akin to what we have in most sports, due to the accidents of nature and personal efforts. These cannot be reasonably objected to, and the avoidance of them would bring on far worse inequalities. Of course, this may not suffice as a solution to many who want socioeconomic inequality completely erased in human communal life.

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