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Social justice, free market style

Challenging orthodoxy on both left and right, political theorist John Tomasi develops a new account of liberal justice free market fairness to show how limited government and the material betterment of the poor can be reconciled. In doing so, he asks the left to rethink their attitude towards private economic liberty.
For many decades, liberal political theorists have been divided into two stark and uncompromising camps. This division among political philosophers is mirrored in a division within our popular politics, a division between political parties of the left and right. Among the political philosophers, I think of this divide as being like a frozen, windswept sea. Off the coast on one side, we have the embattled camp of the conservatives, classical liberals and libertarians. I picture this group hunkered down on the ice, with a cold wind flapping against their tents. Their heroes are the frostbitten figures of Michael Oakeshott, FA Hayek and Robert Nozick. As a matter of philosophical principle, this group defends limited government and strong rights of private property. They are sceptical of, or reject outright, any notion of social or distributive justice. This group provides the philosophical grounding for Thatcherite Toryism or, perhaps better, for the American Tea Party. On the other side, we have the camp of the modern, egalitarian or to adopt the label they themselves prefer the high liberals. Within the academy, this is the dominant, luxurious camp. Instead of tattered tents, I imagine them sitting in warm igloos (say, with gas heaters, furs and satellite dishes). Their battle cry is: social justice! To pursue that ideal, high liberals advocate a government of expansive powers, especially regarding the provision of social goods and services. They are chary of, or reject altogether, the private economic liberties of capitalism. So too they are morally sceptical of the distributions of goods and opportunities that result from the (uncorrected) exercise of those capitalist freedoms. This position has been championed in recent decades by academics such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Tony Judt. It finds popular exemplars in the leadership of the Labour party or, better, of the Occupy movement. The dispute between these two camps is not merely institutional. Instead, each side is fixed in position because each affirms a different conception of moral personhood itself.

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Consider first the classical liberals and libertarians. All liberals value the civil and political rights of individuals: the right to a fair trial, freedom of expression, political participation, personal autonomy, and so on. But the members of this camp are distinct in asserting that the economic rights of capitalism the right to start a business, personally negotiate the terms of ones employment, or decide how to spend (or save) the income one earns are essential parts of freedom too. Possessing some particular bundle of material goods, according to classical liberals and libertarians, is not nearly as important as possessing those goods because of ones own actions and choices. When we are free, we are aware of ourselves as central causes of the lives we lead. It is not just captains of industry or heroes of Ayn Rand novels who define themselves through their accomplishments in the economic realm. Many ordinary people become who they are, and express who they hope to be, by the personal choices they make regarding work, saving and spending. These are areas in which people earn esteem from others and feel a proper pride for things they themselves do. Like many people around the world, I associate these libertarian ideas with the United States (though we might debate whether Americans affirm these ideas still). Dean Alfanges 1951 poem An Americans Creed includes these lines: I do not wish to be a kept citizen, Humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk, To dream and to build, To fail and to succeed. According to philosophers in this camp, diminishing personal agency in economic affairs no matter how lofty the social goal drains vital blood from a persons life. Whatever life they lead, on this ideal, citizens know it is substantially one of their own creation. Why this emphasis on property rights? Well, classical liberals such as Hayek and Richard Epstein are consequentialists: for purposes of political justification, they think of the person as a happiness seeker. They believe that capitalist institutions are efficient and defend market-society for that reason. Their libertarian campmates, such as Nozick, slightly differently, begin their political discussions from the Lockean idea of persons as self-owners beings who, having natural rights of ownership in themselves, have natural ownership rights to the fruits of their labour too. Whether self-owners or individual happiness maximisers, philosophers on this coast claim that respecting persons means respecting property rights. These rights define, and strictly limit, the scope of legitimate state action. Off the other coast, philosophers start from different premises. For them, political questions are not settled by asking what natural rights individuals have and then considering what room (if any) is left for the state. Nor do they believe that the best society is simply the most economically efficient one. Instead, according to Rawls, the problem of political justification is to

Possessing some particular bundle of material goods, according to classical liberals and libertarians, is not nearly as important as possessing those goods because of ones own actions and choices.

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be settled by working out a problem of deliberation.1 This approach insists that state institutions must pass a test of acceptability to citizens, where citizens are understood as persons who, in their moral nature, wish to live together on terms that all can accept. According to philosophers on the left, this deliberative or democratic approach is closely connected to a further idea: the idea of social, or distributive, justice. Against the libertarians and traditional classical liberals, left liberals insist that the concept justice applies to more than mere individual actions. Instead, the social order as a whole can properly be described as just or unjust. Institutions must be arranged so people can look upon the special skills and talents of their fellow citizens not as weapons to be feared but as in some sense a common bounty. Everyone is the author of a life, and the storyline of that life is fantastically important. We honour the importance of self-authorship when we insist that our institutions leave no one, and no group, behind. Why this emphasis on social justice and public justification? Philosophers on the left see these requirements as arising from an idea of the person not as a self-owner or utility-maximiser but as a democratic citizen. Such citizens are conceived as having their own lives to lead. But they are also seen as being deeply concerned for the lives of their fellow citizens. They think of each other as free and equal self-governing agents, born alone and distinct but nonetheless committed to share in one anothers fate. For high liberals, politics begins with the idea of the person as a democratic citizen. Even this brief description makes it easy to see why the sea between these two camps long ago thickened and froze. Because each side begins from fundamentally different conceptions of moral personhood, there can be no compromise or middle ground between them. Occasionally, some thinker from one side or the other will emerge from his shelter and call out to his rivals across the frozen strait: Abandon your camp and its moral foundations and come join ours. But for the most part, Pauline conversions such as this are too much to be asked. So the members of each camp hunker down with their ancestral brethren and go about their business. And the wind between them howls lonely and wild: Economic liberty or social justice? Capitalism or democracy? Hayek or Rawls? The Tea Party or Occupy London? Free markets or fairness? In my new book Free Market Fairness I propose a moral standard of liberal justice that disrupts this orthodoxy.2 Like the libertarians, I believe that private economic liberty is a vital part of human freedom. And yet I am also committed to the high liberal idea of social justice, the idea that social institutions should be arranged so as to express the respect that democratic citizens have for one another, regardless of their social or economic class. So, as a classical liberal, I cross the frozen sea and affirm the left liberal idea of the democratic citizen. Affirming the same conception of the person as the left liberals, and yet carrying with me moral insights from the libertarian camp, I then invite left liberals to begin thinking anew about the moral requirements of democratic citizenship. Do we really best
1 2

Like the libertarians, I believe that private economic liberty is a vital part of human freedom. And yet I am also committed to the high liberal idea of social justice.

Rawls J (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press: 17. Tomasi J (2012) Free Market Fairness, New York: Princeton University Press.

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respect our fellow citizens by restricting their private economic liberties? Is deliberative democracy really a vehicle that can only make left turns? If both sides reasoned together from common ground, might we discover a new, higher, morally more ambitious, democratic ideal? So I propose an interpretation of liberal justice that I call free market fairness. Free market fairness seeks to combine the erstwhile immiscibles: economic liberty and social justice, democracy and capitalism, Rawls and Hayek, Occupy London and the Tea Party fairness and free markets. To develop this new account of liberal justice, we need two things: a thoroughly democratic argument for private economic liberty and a conception of distributive justice that is compatible with the affirmation of economic liberty. In combination, we would then have before us a new interpretation of social justice, one that might be stood up as a moral rival to the familiar left-liberal accounts of social justice. Let me say a word about each of these two requirements. Economic liberties protect independent economic activity, such as activities across the realms of working and of owning. Traditionally, liberals affirmed a thick conception of economic liberty, according to which a wide range of private economic activities were assigned a great deal of moral weight. But beginning with John Stuart Mill, the liberal attitude toward economic liberties began to change. Mill thought that private economic activity had no essential link to liberty. Rights and powers of ownership, Mill concluded, should be defined in terms of social utility. In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes likewise argued against the moral importance of independent economic activity. Writing in 1930, Keynes predicted that within 100 years the wealth of western societies would have increased by roughly eight times (a shockingly accurate prediction, according to my economist friends). With the arrival of prosperity, according to Keynes, the old virtues of personal economic ambition, hard work and self-denying saving would be revealed at last as the vices (Keynes calls them morbid neuroses) that they had always been.3 More recently, and more formally, Rawls takes the traditional list of basic liberal rights and singles out the economic liberties to be pared down. On Rawls thin conception of economic liberties, only two severely scalpelled economic liberties are considered basic: a narrow right to occupational choice and a right to own personal (non-productive) property. This assertion about the unimportance of economic liberty is a junction point perhaps the key junction point in the history of liberal thought. If the traditional thick conception of economic liberty is abandoned, it is up to legislative bodies to define the rules of economic life. Liberalism becomes compatible not only with an expansive welfare state but even with socialism (since liberal citizens are no longer recognised as having a basic right to the private ownership of productive property). By the middle of the 20th century, social reformers such as Richard Titmuss predicted that, as productivity increased due to industrialisation, citizens would gladly trade in
3

This assertion about the unimportance of economic liberty is a junction point perhaps the key junction point in the history of liberal thought.

Available at http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf: 6.

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their old economic liberties in order to empower central decision-makers to craft programmes that would justly allot social wealth. Citizens could at last turn away from the dismal challenges of economic production in competitive markets and to the happier, collective-democratic questions of distribution. To the dismay of Titmuss followers, something close to the opposite occurred. In liberal societies across the world, wealth made workers less enthusiastic about joining unions and other collective bargaining structures. As incomes rose, working class citizens became less willing to pay taxes in support of state-based service programs. Labour MP Frank Field expressed this point with startling directness:4 The idea that rising tax bills will be hidden by rising real wages has proved to be one of the great fallacies of the post-war period. Rising income levels now offer a growing body of voters the chance to make major decisions themselves on the composition of their standard of living. Such opportunities are seized with relish. In many liberal societies, increased wealth makes the exercise of private economic liberty not less but more important to people. One need not revert to the old libertarian arguments about self-ownership and absolute rights to property in order to capture these moral sentiments of ordinary workers. The democratic principles of the left provide rich enough philosophical soil for a commitment to private economic liberty to be regrown. We should affirm private economic liberties as a sign of the respect we owe our fellow citizens to make decisions about saving, working and spending in light of their own values and ideals. How many hours to work each week, and on what terms? How much to spend on living now and how much to save for retirement or health insurance? How to balance the calls of work with the calls of family and other projects? For many citizens, this is the very stuff of life. The particular balance that each of us strikes says a lot about what each of us values and about the kind of person each of us is. A social order best respects its citizens, and best encourages them to develop their moral powers, when it protects the liberty of citizens to make such decisions for themselves.5 But what about the other democratic idea I mentioned, the idea of distributive justice? If our commitment to respect the freedom and equality of our fellow citizens leads us to affirm individuals as holding powerful economic liberties, that same commitment leads us to be concerned that everyone has sufficient material means to make those liberties valuable. But is it possible to respect the economic liberties of our fellow citizens while also pursuing social justice? I believe this circle can be squared. To see how, I invite readers on the left to join me in looking afresh at the assumptions we have inherited about what distributive justice requires, and thus about the social institutions that are most fit to pursue that ideal. A society is distributively just, lets say, if, along with protecting basic rights and liberties, its institutions operate in such a way that no group is left behind. Indeed, the most just set of political and economic institutions
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In many liberal societies, increased wealth makes the exercise of private economic liberty not less but more important to people.

Field F (1998) What, Then, Was Unthinkable?, Crucible (London: Board for Social Responsibility): 21. I develop this idea in Free Market Fairness and in Economic Liberty and Democratic Legitimacy, Social Philosophy and Policy, 29(1): 5080.

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would be the one that generates the largest possible bundle of benefits for the poor. I do not think I need to convince readers of Juncture or of IPPR more widely of the moral attractions of this idea. However, people who affirm this general principle face difficult choices when it comes time to define what counts as a benefit to the least well-off (what Philippe van Parijs astutely calls the distribuendum of distributive justice6). One answer is suggested by the line of left-liberal luminaries that runs through Mill and Keynes to Rawls. Significantly, all three were drawn to the moral ideal of a slow or no-growth economy (Mills stationary-state). I do not mean that these paragons of left-liberalism, if invited to advise todays Labour party, would say put the brakes on growth! We are speaking here at the level of moral imagination. This is the level at which we state our ideals, our conception of the best way for society to be organised and thus the most fully human way for citizens to live and work together, if only we could get there. For thinkers in this left-liberal tradition, economic growth is important, yet it is important only in the sense of a phase that must be gotten through. The point of economic growth is the achievement of prosperity. And it is only with prosperity, on this view, that perfect justice may be found. Now, if you think justice requires that we prefer institutions that maximise the wealth of the poor, this attraction to the ideal of the stationary state generates a puzzle. Over time, a faster-growing economy would make more financial benefits available to the poor (whether through a rising tide of market exchanges or, if you prefer, through state-based redistributive programmes spreading that ever-greater wealth around). How can these left-liberal paragons square their commitment to social justice with their attraction to the stationary state as a moral ideal? The solution to this puzzle is that for thinkers on this side, ultimately, wealth is not the primary distribuendum of distributive justice. People on the left want the poor to have more wealth, of course. Yet when forced to choose which combination of benefits to maximise, thinkers on the left hold that, at some point, there are other values that are more important than maximising peoples private material holdings. For example, some on the left think it more important that material wealth be equally distributed, even if over time that means people have less in real terms. Similarly, they may think it more important that their fellow citizens experience a certain kind of workplace than that their private wealth continue to be increased. Those slow-growing economies, after all, may allow citizens to experience a sense of solidarity, both through the greater equality of their holdings and through a more equal sharing of authority in their places of work. And, as a matter of moral principle, it is the benefits to be reaped from those ways of living together that left liberals think should be maximised.7 By now you will not be surprised to learn that the conception of distributive justice that I prefer sees things differently. Free market fairness suggests that we do not respect our fellow citizens as free and equal citizens, each recognising all others as unique beings with lives of their own to lead, by
6

Van Parijs P (2003) Difference Principles in Freeman S (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, New York: Cambridge University Press: 200240. Samuel Freeman attributes a view like this to his teacher, John Rawls. See Freemans path-breaking article Capitalism in the Classical and High Liberal Traditions, Social Philosophy and Policy, 28(2): 1955.

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seeking to impose upon them all some pattern of workplace organisation that we ourselves prefer. Nor do we respect them by truncating their economic liberties in pursuit of solidarity. Instead, basic rights in place, we best respect our fellow citizens when we seek out institutions that maximise the wealth personally controlled by each. Lets pause for a moment, because here the stakes in our discussion about what social justice requires begin to climb. As I see it, the progressive political philosophers of the early and mid-20th century did us a great service. They brought us the principle of democratic legitimacy and, under heavy fire from old-guard classical liberals and libertarians, they brought us the ideal of social justice too. However, the only way these (erstwhile) progressive thinkers could see to affirm the ideal of social justice was by belittling and paring back the economic liberties of their fellow citizens (those bourgeois convictions about independent work and private savings, recall, toward which Lord Keynes looked down his long nose). Further, they thought fit to make a judgment on behalf of their fellow citizens that, at some point, leisure was more civilized and ennobling than the struggles and quiet accomplishments of economic life. When pushed to declare what distributive benefits are owed the working poor, left liberals such as Mill, Keynes and Rawls with visions of workers cooperatives dancing in their heads plumped for greater workplace democracy, rather than for greater personal wealth, for the most poor. To resist this moral vision is to resist the democratic ideal of social justice itself: leave this camp and the only shelter you will find is in the tattered tent of property-rights absolutism on the other side. Poppycock. We have laboured within this tyranny of dualisms for too long. It is time past time that people who are committed to deliberative forms of political justification face an important fact: left liberals of the 20th century pioneered the idea of social justice, but this does not mean that they get to define the requirements of social justice forevermore. Deliberative democracy makes room for enthusiastically capitalistic interpretations of the requirements of social justice. Beyond the social democratic approach to social justice, high upon a hill, there is conceptual space for the development of a variety of what I call market democratic approaches to social justice. And the particular market democratic approach that I prefer is free market fairness. This is a product of democratic reasoning enriched by insights from libertarians about the moral importance of independent economic activity. Unlike social democratic accounts, free market fairness encourages democratic citizens to respect each other as holders of economic liberties as well as civil and political ones, although, unlike the icebound libertarians, free market fairness does not defend these liberties in instrumental terms of securing economic efficiency or as moral absolutes. Also, unlike social democratic accounts, free market fairness unambiguously insists that, the full scheme of rights in place, we best respect the poor when we adopt institutions designed to maximise the bundle of wealth personally controlled by the lowest-paid workers

Deliberative democracy makes room for enthusiastically capitalistic interpretations of the requirements of social justice.

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(and not institutions designed to reduce inequalities between groups). Such an uncompromising commitment to maximising the holdings of the poor, even if in doing so some citizens may personally control much larger bundles of goods than others, implies that free market fairness rejects traditional pleas for relative equality. Our goal is to boost the absolute position of the poor. In contrast to libertarians and classic liberals, therefore, free market fairness includes distributive elements as well. A just society is not simply one in which everyones (negative) rights are protected. But where high liberals adopt a social democratic interpretation of the distributive requirements of social justice favouring, for instance, state programmes designed to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor free market fairness takes a different approach. Free markets are a kind of fairness. A fair share is the largest possible bundle of real wealth that might be procured for the least fortunate, consistent with respecting the rights of other citizens. Unlike traditional libertarian views, free market fairness recognises that this may call for a government safety net to assist those genuinely in need. But free market fairness insists that we tread cautiously here. In seeking to benefit the least well-off, we must take care to do so in ways that also protect their autonomy as citizens. Whats most important, as a matter of moral ideal, is not simply that the less fortunate have things, but that they have those things as a result of their own economic agency. Free market fairness insists that an opportunity for a life of freedom and independence is owed not just to the wealthy but to citizens of every economic class: entry-level workers, single parents, members of the middle class and trailer park residents too. If free market fairness offers this alternative account of what democratic justice requires, what then are the social institutions most fit to pursue it? This is a complex issue, but allow me to offer a thought that may give some readers pause. In the US and in the UK too it is widely believed that anyone sincerely committed to social justice should work to make their society more like the European social democracies (Sweden, say, Denmark, or France). No doubt there is a social democratic conception of justice according to which such an ambition might be applauded. But there is a rival conception of democratic justice that aims higher still. By protecting a wider range of private economic liberty, by limiting the paternalistic reach of government, and by creating an environment in which creative commercial capacities of individuals are unleashed to the benefit of all, without artificial limit or cap, this rival conception sets out a loftier, more morally ambitious ideal of democratic living-together. I call this rival account of social justice free market fairness. But I do not mind if my English cousins prefer a less formal name: call it social justice, American-style.
John Tomasi is professor of political science at Brown University, where he is also the founder and director of Browns Political Theory Project. His new book Free Market Fairness is published by Princeton University Press.

In contrast to libertarians and classic liberals, therefore, free market fairness includes distributive elements as well.

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