This is T. M. Scanlon latest book about the ethics of inequality of a society: in what circumstances we ought to object inequal treatments, given it is a core part of an institution. Several conventions and norms are being examined very closely in the book and showed that these ideas promoting inequality are unjust and harming individual and even the functionality of the governance of a state. I will briefly mention a few of these ideas and please go for a more professional digest and even better, read the book, if you intend to learn more.
Scalon used Rawl’s different principle as the main framework to study if current treatment of the “worse off” people in the society is justified. The different principle regulates unfair distribution of benefits in the society, and states that inequality is permissible under equal opportunity conditions. Such “equal opportunity conditions” was explored in education, politics, and career options, prominent areas affected by economic inequality.
A lot of the positions that has an advantage of benefits (higher income, power, and influences) required certain skills and knowledge at entry level. With an underfunded education system, rich families can easily exclude the poor from getting accesses to these position by providing their own family member extra tuitions. This is very obvious on the admission system in more prestigious schools. Scanlon argued that it is impossible to indefintely imporve everyone’s education and unthinkable to limit the richer kids from further educations, but including the prerequisite skills as part of the course but not a selection criteria would reduce such inequality of accesses.
The inequality of opportunity then extends to politics if only the rich has the access to obtain the qualifications to hold positions in the legislative or judiciary bodies. The lack of opportunities to prestigious positions exacerbate the plight of the poor as their problems are not being addressed through policy or institutional reform. How much understandings and incentives would the rich have to improve the life of the poor? Worse, the rich actively influences the media and exclude the poor people from spreading their ideas and receiving important information for elections. Such influences deeply threatens democracy even with a fair electoral system.
As a result, policies made by the institution will put very little consideration of the poor; undermining the legitimacy of the regime as it could not achieve equal concern: weighting everyone equally important.
In tackling the justification of unequal shares of profit, Scanlon has raise important questions about desert and contribution. On desert, he questions why certain abilities, talents, and expertise deserve economic rewards, but not praise of respects by the society? On whether management roles contribute on a factory productivity, Scanlon showed that the marginal profits added by effective management shall be shared between the workers and the manager in the light of such “directing” merely helps the worker, but on its own cannot account to any productivity. From there, even the workers are not “being rubbed of their fruit of labor”, they are suffering from the unequal distribution of the profit.
And Scanlon pointed out that salaries and wages are norms, created by the negotiations between powerful employers and helpless employees. Indeed, the employers decide what skills they value, how much they would pay for wages and other benefits. Under such forces in the job market, people would be coerced to jobs they hate and received minimal wages to keep them in such desperate situations to work on that job. On another hand, a firm functionality is not necessarily tied to the high economic rewards of the management sector; we potentially can change the norm of high pay and still maintain productivity.
To relieve such inequality, Scanlon argue that universal basic income is crucial for people to regain their autonomy. In addition, employees should own their means of labors by building effective unions and holding shares of their own companies. Meanwhile, the institution shall maintain a wide range of occupations and life-long education courses to ensure everyone can have options, to work on what they want to.
At individual level, the inequality itself and the reasoning to maintain such inequality is harmful to our own well-being and development. The main justification of economic inequality stemmed from merits; however, merits are not determined by a fair institution. This makes the options of how people would like to lead their life very narrow. While people seeking alternative life styles were painted as lazy or making the wrong choices, such moralistic reasoning enforced by the media would justify poverty and poor treatment. And finally these people were being shamed as inferior, further justifying their inaccessibility to resources and opportunities. In this full-blown form of status poverty, people would lose their freedom and dignity.
To point out the injustice of the economic inequality is not to evade personal responsibilities of life and career choices. On the contrary, Scanlon described all the constrains, imposed by such inequality, on what people can choose realistically. These constrains, unfairly put upon the poor, are why we shall object such inequality and mitigate its effect.