Development as Freedom (12 page)

Thus, neither of the purist approaches emerges unscathed in terms of analysis by results, suggesting that arrangements regarding property may have to be judged, at least partly, by their likely consequences. This conclusion is in line with the utilitarian spirit, even though full utilitarianism would insist on a very specific way of judging consequences and their relevance. The general case for taking full note of results in judging policies and institutions is a momentous and plausible requirement, which has gained much from the advocacy of utilitarian ethics.

Similar arguments can be presented in favor of taking note of human well-being in judging results, rather than looking only at some abstract and alienated characteristics of states of affairs. The focusing on consequences and on well-being, thus, have points in their favor, and this endorsement—it is only a partial endorsement—of the utilitarian approach to justice relates directly to its informational base.

The handicaps of the utilitarian approach can also be traced to its informational base. Indeed, it is not hard to find fault with the utilitarian conception of justice.
¹¹
To mention just a few, the following would appear to be among the deficiencies that a fully utilitarian approach yields.

The first two criticisms are rather more immediate than the third, and perhaps I should comment a little only on the third—the issue of mental conditioning and its effect on the utilitarian calculus. Concentrating exclusively on mental characteristics (such as pleasure, happiness or desires) can be particularly restrictive when making
interpersonal
comparisons of well-being and deprivation. Our desires and pleasure-taking abilities adjust to circumstances, especially to make life bearable in adverse situations. The utility calculus can be deeply unfair to those who are persistently deprived: for example, the usual underdogs in stratified societies, perennially oppressed minorities in intolerant communities, traditionally precarious sharecroppers living in a world of uncertainty, routinely overworked sweatshop
employees in exploitative economic arrangements, hopelessly subdued housewives in severely sexist cultures. The deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible.
¹²
The mental metric of pleasure or desire is just too malleable to be a firm guide to deprivation and disadvantage.

It is thus important not only to take note of the fact that in the scale of utilities the deprivation of the persistently deprived may look muffled and muted, but also to favor the creation of conditions in which people have real opportunities of judging the kind of lives they would like to lead. Social and economic factors such as basic education, elementary health care, and secure employment are important not only on their own, but also for the role they can play in giving people the opportunity to approach the world with courage and freedom. These considerations require a broader informational base, focusing particularly on people’s capability to choose the lives they have reason to value.

I turn now to the most influential—and in many ways the most important—of contemporary theories of justice, that of John Rawls.
¹³
His theory has many components, but I start with a particular requirement that John Rawls has called “the priority of liberty.” Rawls’s own formulation of this priority is comparatively moderate, but that priority takes a particularly sharp form in modern libertarian theory, which in some formulations (for example, in the elegantly uncompromising construction presented by Robert Nozick) puts extensive classes of rights—varying from personal liberties to property rights—as having nearly complete political precedence over the pursuit of social goals (including the removal of deprivation and destitution).
¹⁴
These rights take the form of “side constraints,” which simply must not be violated. The procedures that are devised to guarantee rights, which are to be accepted no matter what consequences follow from them, are simply not on the same plane (so the argument goes) as the things that we may judge to be desirable (utilities, well-being,
equity of outcomes or opportunities, and so on). The issue, then, in this formulation, is not the
comparative importance
of rights, but their
absolute priority
.

In less demanding formulations of “priority of liberty” presented in liberal theories (most notably, in the writings of John Rawls), the rights that receive precedence are much less extensive, and essentially consist of various personal liberties, including some basic political and civil rights.
¹⁵
But the precedence that these more limited rights receive is meant to be quite complete, and while these rights are much more confined in coverage than those in libertarian theory, they too cannot be in any way compromised by the force of economic needs.

The case for such a complete priority can be disputed by demonstrating the force of other considerations, including that of economic needs. Why should the status of intense economic needs, which can be matters of life and death, be lower than that of personal liberties? This issue was forcefully raised in a general form by Herbert Hart a long time ago (in a famous article in 1973). John Rawls has acknowledged the force of this argument in his later book
Political Liberalism
and suggested ways of accommodating it within the structure of his theory of justice.
¹⁶

If the “priority of liberty” is to be made plausible even in the context of countries that are intensely poor, the content of that priority would have to be, I would argue, considerably qualified. This does not, however, amount to saying that liberty should not have priority, but rather that the form of that demand should not have the effect of making economic needs be easily overlooked. It is, in fact, possible to distinguish between (1) Rawls’s strict proposal that liberty should receive overwhelming
precedence
in the case of a conflict, and (2) his general procedure of separating out personal liberty from other types of advantages for
special treatment
. The more general second claim concerns the need to assess and evaluate liberties differently from individual advantages of other kinds.

The critical issue, I would submit, is not complete precedence, but whether a person’s liberty should get just the same kind of importance
(no more)
that other types of personal advantages—incomes, utilities and so on—have. In particular, the question is whether the significance of liberty for the society is adequately reflected by the weight that the person herself would tend to give to it in judging her
own
overall
advantage. The claim of preeminence of liberty (including basic political liberties and civil rights) disputes that it is adequate to judge liberty simply as an advantage—like an extra unit of income—that the person herself receives from that liberty.

In order to prevent a misunderstanding, I should explain that the contrast is
not
with the value that citizens attach—and have reason to attach—to liberty and rights in their
political
judgments. Quite the contrary: the safeguarding of liberty has to be ultimately related to the general political acceptability of its importance. The contrast, rather, is with the extent to which having more liberty or rights increases an individual’s own
personal
advantage, which is only a
part
of what is involved. The claim here is that the political significance of rights can far exceed the extent to which the personal advantage of the holders of these rights is enhanced by having these rights. The interests of others are also involved (since liberties of different people are interlinked), and also the violation of liberty is a procedural transgression that we may have reason to resist as a bad thing in itself. There is, thus, an asymmetry with other sources of individual advantage, for example incomes, which would be valued largely on the basis of how much they contribute to the respective personal advantages. The safeguarding of liberty and basic political rights would have the procedural priority that follows from this asymmetric prominence.

This issue is particularly important in the context of the constitutive role of liberty and political and civil rights in making it possible to have public discourse and communicative emergence of agreed norms and social values. I shall examine this difficult issue more fully in
chapters 6
and
10
.

I return now to the issue of complete priority of rights, including property rights, in the more demanding versions of libertarian theory. For example, in Nozick’s theory (as presented in
Anarchy, State and Utopia
), the “entitlements” that people have through the exercise of these rights cannot, in general, be outweighed because of their results—no matter how nasty those results may be. A very exceptional exemption is given by Nozick to what he calls “catastrophic
moral horrors,” but this exemption is not very well integrated with the rest of Nozick’s approach, nor is this exemption matched with a proper justification (it remains quite ad hoc). The uncompromising priority of libertarian rights can be particularly problematic since the actual consequences of the operation of these entitlements can, quite possibly, include rather terrible results. It can, in particular, lead to the violation of the substantive freedom of individuals to achieve those things to which they have reason to attach great importance, including escaping avoidable mortality, being well nourished and healthy, being able to read, write and count and so on. The importance of these freedoms cannot be ignored on grounds of the “priority of liberty.”

For example, as is shown in my
Poverty and Famines
, even gigantic famines can result without anyone’s libertarian rights (including property rights) being violated.
¹⁷
The destitutes such as the unemployed or the impoverished may starve precisely because their “entitlements”—legitimate as they are—do not give them enough food. This might look like a special case of a “catastrophic moral horror,” but horrors of
any
degree of seriousness—all the way from gigantic famines to regular undernourishment and endemic but nonextreme hunger—can be shown to be consistent with a system in which no one’s libertarian rights are violated. Similarly, deprivation of other types (for example, the lack of medical care for curable illnesses) can coexist with all libertarian rights (including rights of property ownership) being fully satisfied.

The proposal of a consequence-independent theory of political priority is afflicted by considerable indifference to the substantive freedoms that people end up having—or not having. We can scarcely agree to accept simple procedural rules
irrespective
of consequences—no matter how dreadful and totally unacceptable these consequences might be for the lives of the people involved. Consequential reasoning, in contrast, can attach great importance to the fulfillment or violation of individual liberties (and may even give it a specially favored treatment) without ignoring other considerations, including the actual impact of the respective procedures on the substantive freedoms that people actually have.
¹⁸
To ignore consequences in general, including the freedoms that people get—or do not get—to exercise, can hardly be an adequate basis for an acceptable evaluative system.

In terms of its informational basis, libertarianism as an approach is just too limited. Not only does it ignore those variables to which utilitarian and welfarist theories attach great importance, but it also neglects the most basic freedoms that we have reason to treasure and demand. Even if liberty is given a special status, it is highly implausible to claim that it would have as absolute and relentless a priority as libertarian theories insist it must have. We need a broader informational basis of justice.

In traditional utilitarian ethics, “utility” is defined simply as happiness or pleasure, and sometimes as the fulfillment of desires. These ways of seeing utility in terms of mental metrics (of happiness or of desire) have been used not only by such pioneering philosophers as Jeremy Bentham, but also by utilitarian economists such as Francis Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou and Dennis Robertson. As was discussed earlier in this chapter, this mental metric is subject to distortions brought about by psychological adjustment to persistent deprivation. This is indeed a major limitation of the reliance on the subjectivism of mental metrics such as pleasures or desires. Can utilitarianism be rescued from this limitation?

In modern use of “utility” in contemporary choice theory, its identification with pleasure or desire-fulfillment has been largely abandoned in favor of seeing utility simply as the numerical representation of a person’s choice. I should explain that this change has occurred not really in response to the problem of mental adjustment, but mainly in reaction to the criticisms made by Lionel Robbins and other methodological positivists that interpersonal comparisons of different people’s minds were “meaningless” from the scientific point of view. Robbins argued that there are “no means whereby such comparisons can be accomplished.” He even cited—and agreed with—the doubts first expressed by W. S. Jevons, the utilitarian guru, himself: “Every mind is inscrutable to every other mind and no common denominator of feelings is possible.”
¹⁹
As economists convinced themselves that there was indeed something methodologically wrong in using interpersonal comparison of utilities, the fuller version of the
utilitarian tradition soon gave way to various compromises. The particular compromise that is extensively used now is to take utility to be nothing other than the representation of a person’s preference. As was mentioned earlier, in this version of utility theory, to say that a person has more utility in state
x
than in state
y
is not essentially different from saying that she would choose to be in state
x
rather than in state
y
.