The Idea of Justice
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Where problems arise is in the claim that: ‘Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.’ Layard points to the fact that ‘the American Declaration of Independence says, it is a ‘‘self-evident’’ objective’.6 (In fact, what the American Declaration of Independence did say was that it was ‘self-evident’ that everyone is ‘endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’, and it is in the elaboration of those diverse rights that the right to happiness figured – among several other objectives – not entirely
‘unlike all other goals’). It is the claim that nothing else ultimately matters – liberty, equality, fraternity or whatever – that may not resonate so easily with the way people have thought and continue to think about what looks self-evidently good. This is so whether we examine what moved people in the French Revolution more than two centuries ago, or what people champion today, whether in political practice, or in philosophical analysis (the latter includes, for example, Robert Nozick’s overarching emphasis on the self-evident nature of the importance of liberty, and Ronald Dworkin’s singular focus on equality as the sovereign virtue).7 Something more would be needed in the form of reasoning to give happiness the unique position that Layard wants to offer to it, rather than pointing just to its being
‘self-evidently good’.
Despite Layard’s strongly stated belief that in defending the criterion of happiness, ‘we can give no further, external reason’, he actually does go on to give such a reason – indeed, one with some plausibility. In disputing the claim of capabilities, Layard presents the critical argument: ‘But unless we can justify our goals by how people feel, there is a real danger of paternalism’ (p. 113). The avoidance of paternalism is surely an external reason, different from the allegedly undiscussable self-evident goodness of happiness. Layard invokes the charge of paternalism – that of playing ‘God and deciding what is good for others’ – against any social observer who notes that the hopelessly deprived often adapt to their deprivation to make life more bearable, without making that deprivation go away.
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Layard’s operative assumption lies in the tail of his remark, asking us to refrain from doing what we think is ‘good for others, even if they will never feel it to be so’ ( Happiness, pp. 120–21). Is this fair to those whose views Layard wants to refute? What the critics of unreasoning acceptance of persistent deprivation want is more reasoning about what ails the perennial underdogs, with the expectation that, with more scrutiny, the ‘well-adapted’ deprived would see – and
‘feel’ – reason enough to grumble. It was noted earlier, in Chapter 7
(‘Position, Relevance and Illusion’), that the obedient and unagonized acceptance by women of their subjugation in traditionalist India has been giving way over the decades to some ‘creative discontent’, demanding social change, and that in this change a large role is played by questioning women’s inactive acceptance of a subjugated role without complaint or disquiet.* The role of interactive public discussion on the toleration of chronic deprivation plays a big part, often led by women’s movements, but also more generally through radical political re-examination of diverse sources of inequality in India.
We can – and often do – reason with ourselves in our own reflections, and with each other in public discussions, about the reliability of our convictions and mental reactions in order to check that our immediate feelings are not misleading us. From King Lear’s insistence that we have to place ourselves in the position of others to be able to assess our own inclinations (for example, the inclination to accept uncritically when ‘yond justice’ rails over ‘yond simple thief’), to Adam Smith’s argument about how culturally sequestered people, even in the intellectual glory of classical Athens, may have reason to scrutinize their positive feelings about the common practice of infanticide in that society, the need for reasoning about our unscrutinized feelings can be cogently defended.†
This applies also to the role of public education today, for example on healthcare, food habits or smoking, and it is relevant for understanding the need for open debate on issues of immigration, racial intolerance, lack of medical entitlements or women’s position in
* I wish I could move my friend Richard Layard from all Bentham to a little Mill.
† For an excellent analysis of the case for persistent re-examination of one’s lives, beliefs and practices, see Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Medi-tations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e society, without unleashing alleged paternalism. There is a lot of reasoning that can – and in many societies does – challenge the unquestioned hegemony of ‘feelings’ and unexamined sentiments over all else.
t h e e v i d e n t i a l i n t e r e s t
o f
h a p p i n e s s
Happiness, important as it is, can hardly be the only thing that we have reason to value, nor the only metric for measuring other things that we value. But when being happy is not given such an imperialist role, it can, with good reason, be seen as a very important human functioning, among others. The capability to be happy is, similarly, a major aspect of the freedom that we have good reason to value. The perspective of happiness illuminates a critically important part of human life.
In addition to its own importance, happiness can also be seen to have some evidential interest and pertinence. We have to take note of the fact that the achievement of other things that we do value (and have reason to value) very often influences our sense of happiness –
generated by that fulfilment. It is natural to take pleasure in our success in achieving what we are trying to achieve. Similarly, on the negative side, our failure to get what we value can be a source of disappointment. So happiness and frustration relate, respectively, to our successes and failures to achieve the fulfilment of our objectives –
no matter what these objectives are. This can be of great circumstantial relevance in checking whether people are succeeding or failing to get what they value and have reason to value.
This recognition need not, however, lead us to the belief that we value the things that we do value just for the reason that not getting them would lead to frustration. Rather, the reasons that we have for the valuation of our objectives (no matter how remote these objectives are from merely seeking happiness) actually help to explain why we may sensibly feel happy about achieving what we are trying to achieve, and frustrated when we do not succeed. Happiness can thus have 276
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indicative merit in being, typically, related to our successes and failures in life. This is so even though happiness is not the only thing we seek, or have reason to seek.
u t i l i t a r i a n i s m a n d
w e l f a r e
e c o n o m i c s
I return now to the treatment of happiness in economics in general and what is called welfare economics in particular (dealing with the well-being of people both as a subject of interest and as a guide to policy-making). Utilitarians, such as Bentham, or Edgeworth, or Marshall, or Pigou, saw no great difficulty in asserting that the ranking of social goodness and the selection of what is to be chosen must be done simply on the basis of the sum total of individual welfares.
And they took individual welfare as being represented by individual
‘utility’, and typically identified utility with individual happiness. They also tended to ignore the problems of distributional inequality of welfares and utilities among different people. Thus all alternative states were judged by the sum total of happiness that can be found in the respective states, and alternative policies were assessed by the
‘total happiness’ that resulted from these policies, respectively.
The subject of welfare economics suffered a major blow in the 1930s when econom
ists came to be persuaded by arguments presented by Lionel Robbins and others (influenced by ‘logical positivist’ philosophy) that interpersonal comparisons of utility have no scientific basis and cannot be sensibly made. One person’s happiness, it was argued, could not be compared, in any way, with the happiness of another.
‘Every mind is inscrutable to every other mind,’ Robbins argued, quoting W. S. Jevons, ‘and no common denominator of feeling is possible.’8
This dismissal is deeply problematic since there are plausible rules of comparative assessment of the joys and pains of human life and, even when there remain areas of doubt and dispute, it is not difficult to see why agreements emerge easily enough on some interpersonal comparisons, thereby generating a partial ordering (an issue I have 277
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e discussed elsewhere).* These agreements are also reflected in the language we use to describe the happiness of distinct persons, which does not place different human beings on disparate islands that are all isolated from each other.† It would be hard to follow, say, the tragedy of King Lear, if interpersonal comparisons communicated nothing.
However, since economists came, by and large, to be convinced –
far too rapidly – that there was indeed something methodologically wrong in using interpersonal comparison of utilities, the fuller version of the utilitarian tradition soon gave way, in the 1940s and the 1950s, to an informationally impoverished version of relying on utility or happiness. It came to be known as ‘the new welfare economics’. This took the form of continuing to rely on utilities only (this is often called ‘welfarism’), but of dispensing with interpersonal comparisons altogether. The ‘informational basis’ of welfare economics remained narrowly confined to utilities, but the permitted ways of using the utility information were further restricted by the ban on interpersonal comparisons of utilities. Welfarism without interpersonal comparisons is, in fact, a very restrictive informational basis for social judgements. We could discuss whether the same person is happier in one state than in another, but could not compare, we were told, the happiness of one person with that of another.
* See Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), which argued for the systematic use of interpersonal comparisons of welfare in the form of partial orderings in social choice theory. See also my essay ‘Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare’, in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; republished, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Donald Davidson, ‘Judging Interpersonal Interests’, in Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (eds), Foundations of Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Allan Gibbard, ‘Interpersonal Comparisons: Preference, Good, and the Intrinsic Reward of a Life’, in Elster and Hylland (eds), Foundations of Social Choice Theory (1986). On related matters, see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
† The discipline of language in reflecting an aspect of objectivity was discussed in Chapter 1, ‘Reason and Objectivity’ and 5, ‘Impartiality and Objectivity’.
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i n f o r m a t i o n a l l i m i t a t i o n s a n d
i m p o s s i b i l i t i e s
It was in the context of the ongoing search for acceptable formulations of social welfare that Kenneth Arrow presented his well-known
‘impossibility theorem’. His book Social Choice and Individual Values (published in 1951) launched the new subject of social choice theory.9
As discussed in Chapter 4 (‘Voice and Social Choice’), Arrow considered a set of very mild-looking conditions relating social choices or judgements to the set of individual preferences, and took them to be something like a minimal set of requirements that any decent procedure for social assessment must satisfy. Arrow showed that it is impossible to satisfy those apparently undemanding conditions simultaneously. The ‘impossibility theorem’ precipitated a major crisis in welfare economics, and it is, in fact, a landmark in the history of social and political study as well as economics.
In formulating the problem of social choice based on individual preferences, Arrow took the viewpoint (following what was by then the dominant tradition) that ‘interpersonal comparison of utilities has no meaning’.10 The combination of relying only on individual utilities and denying any use of interpersonal comparison of utilities had a decisive role in precipitating the impossibility theorem.
Let me illustrate an aspect of this difficulty. Consider, for example, the problem of choosing between different distributions of a cake between two or more persons. It turns out that in terms of informational availability in Arrow’s 1951 framework, we cannot, in effect, be guided by any equity consideration that would require the identification of the rich vis-à-vis the poor. If ‘being rich’ or ‘being poor’ is defined in terms of income or commodity holdings, then that is a non-utility characteristic of which we cannot take any direct note in the Arrow system, because of the requirement to rely exclusively on utilities only. But nor can we identify a person’s ‘being rich’ or ‘being poor’ with having a high or a low level of happiness, since that would involve interpersonal comparison of happiness or utilities, which is also ruled out. Equity considerations basically lose their applicability in this framework. The extent of happiness as an 279
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e indicator of a person’s situation is applied to each individual separately – without any comparison between the levels of happiness of two different people – and no use can be made of the happiness metric to assess inequality and to take note of the demands of equity.
All this informational restriction leaves us with a class of decision procedures that are really some variant or other of voting methods (like majority decision). Since they do not need any interpersonal comparison, these voting procedures remain available in Arrow’s informational framework. But these procedures have consistency problems (discussed in Chapter 4), as had been noted more than two hundred years ago by French mathematicians such as Condorcet and Borda. For example, an alternative A can defeat B in a majority vote, while B defeats C, and C defeats A, all in majority voting. We are left, then, with the unattractive possibility of having a dictatorial method of social judgement (i.e. handing it over to one person, the
‘dictator’, whose preferences could then determine the social rankings). Dictatorial decision-making may, of course, be ferociously consistent, but that would be clearly a politically unacceptable method of decision-making, and it is in fact ruled out explicitly by one of Arrow’s conditions (that of ‘non-dictatorship’). This is how Arrow’s impossibility result emerges. A number of other impossibility results were identified soon after, largely under the shadow of Arrow’s theorem, with different axioms but yielding similarly discouraging conclusions.
The ways and means of resolving such impossibilities have been fairly extensively explored since those pessimistic days and, among other things, it has clearly emerged that enriching the informational basis of social choice is an important necessity for overcoming the negative implications of an information-starved decisional system (as voting systems inescapably are, especially when applied to economic and social issues). For one thing, interpersonal comparisons of the advantages and disadvantages of individuals have to be given a central role in such social judgements. If utility is the chosen indicator of individual advantage, then it is interpersonal comparison of utilities that become a crucial necessity for a viable system of social assessment.
This is, however, not to deny that it is possible to have social choice mechanisms that do without any interpersonal comparisons of 280
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advantages or utilities, but the claims of such mechanisms in fulfilling the demands of justice are weakened by their not being able to compare
the well-being and relative advantages of different people in congruent scales.* Alternatively, as was discussed earlier, the informational inputs in a social choice exercise in the form of individual rankings can also be interpreted in ways other than as utility rankings or happiness orderings. Indeed, Arrow himself noted that, and the nature of the debate on the consistency of social choice systems can be – and has been – moved to a broader arena through reinterpreting the variables incorporated in the mathematical model underlying social choice systems. This issue was discussed in Chapter 4 (‘Voice and Social Choice’), and indeed ‘voice’ is a very different – and in many ways a more versatile – idea than the concept of happiness.11
Questions have been raised powerfully in this context about the wisdom of relying only on utility – interpreted as happiness or desire-fulfilment – as the basis of social evaluation, that is, the acceptability of welfarism. As it happens, welfarism in general is in itself a very special approach to social ethics. One of the major limitations of this approach lies in the fact that the same collection of individual welfares may go with a very different overall social picture, with different societal arrangements, opportunities, freedoms and personal liberties.
Welfarism demands that the evaluation pays no direct attention to any of those different (non-utility) features – only to utility or happiness associated with them. But the same set of utility numbers may go, in one case, with serious violations of very basic human freedoms, but not in another. Or it may involve the denial of some recognized individual rights in one case but not in another. No matter what happens in these other respects, welfarism would still demand that those differences be ignored in the evaluative exercises, with each alternative being judged only by the utility totals generated. There is
* Fine examples of such social choice exercise include the classic model of ‘the bargaining problem’ by John Nash (‘The Bargaining Problem’, Econometrica, 18 (1950)) as well as innovative recent departures, such as Marc Fleurbaey’s institutional exploration (‘Social Choice and Just Institutions’, Economics and Philosophy, 23 (2007), and Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008)) that look for symmetry of processes but do not explicitly invoke interpersonal comparisons of well-being.