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HARJUSTISP13_H020400_100
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Professor Sandel: How much inequality is consistent with a
society being just?
And in particular, how much inequality of income and wealth is consistent
with a society being just?
We're going to explore this question by looking at John
Rawls' theory of justice--
the principle that only those inequalities are just that work to the
advantage of the least well off.
I want to hear first from those who disagree with Rawls.
Who would like to start us off with an objection?
In Sao Paulo in the front row.
BARBARA: Hi, my name is Barbara.
And I don't agree with Rawls, because I think if I'm a worker and I'm trying
to work hard and improve in life, and I'm going to keep taking two steps
forward and one back every time I have to share everything I gain with my own
natural methods.
Because it's not my fault if I'm a good investor or if I know where to
put my money and what to buy, because I know people, because I can sell it.
That's not my fault.
I work hard, so I should be allowed to profit.
ARDA: It might not be your fault, but it certainly does not entitle you to
the profits of how you were born.
Just because you happen to have been born to a rich family as opposed to a
poor family doesn't entitle you to the benefits that that family can provide.
Professor Sandel: What's your name?
ARDA: Arda.
SPEAKER 1: But Barbara has said, I worked hard for it.
It's not my fault that I'm successful, and I worked hard for it.
How do you address that part of her argument?
ARDA: So I'm from Turkey, and there are many people in Turkey who were
born to families who have been living on the streets.
And even though those kids might work as hard as I do, they'll
never get to Harvard.
Because basically, it was really tough luck for them in the first place.
And I just feel like it is extremely unfair to assume that the way we are
born can determine the entirety of our life structures.
Professor Sandel: Who else disagrees with Rawls as Barbara does, in Delhi,
Tokyo, Shanghai, or here at Harvard?
NOAH: The reason why I would disagree with that is because the parents of
the children, while it's true that the children don't have any say in how
they're born or under what situation they're born, the parents of the
children and the parents of the parents, most of the time, when
they're working for their money, part of their motivation in doing well is
not just to secure their own benefit, but to secure the
benefit of their children.
And so if you follow that all the way up, assuming that each person works
for not only the benefit of himself, but also for the benefit of their
children, it would be logical to assume that each person, if we did all
start at that same fair equality of opportunity way back when, would now
the children would be entitled to that starting point.
Because each person in their lineage has worked in order to secure them
that starting and deserves what they earned.
ARDA: I see the validity of your argument as well.
But the thing is that at the very beginning of the lineage of those
people lays some inequality and some unfairness in first place.
Those people were also gifted, if you so wish, by things that they were not
necessarily entitled to.
Like for example, being able to run faster than the others in their clan
in the first place.
NOAH: Their parents, part of the reason why they worked so hard was to
get their children that better starting point in the
race than other people.
KWA: My name is Kwa.
I want to say that Rawls' design was very cool.
But actually, it has a big problem that is free rider.
Like you have proved or distributes the benefits and merits of the
ableness of the person to the poor or the bottom ones.
But what if they are just lying on that safety net?
They are not willing to struggle or work harder just to expect the
distributions of the upper class.
And they will be in the status of dependence--
the dependence of chances, but not by their own effort.
Professor Sandel: Is there someone who can defend Rawls' theory against Kwa's
objections?
SPEAKER 4: What our friend from Shanghai is saying that Rawls'
principle gives free riders.
However, what I believe is that Rawls' principle is trying to correct for
certain injustices that happened before.
So it's not exactly giving free riders out of the largest right now.
It's trying to do away with the kind of injustices that happened
previously, historically.
Professor Sandel: Thank you for that.
But what if in trying to address injustices in the past--
and this I suppose, could also be a reply to Noah--
I think Kwa in Shanghai worries that any system of redistribution that
requires the successful to devote their winnings to the least advantaged
will reduce incentives for people to work hard and to achieve success, and
will allow the poor, who don't try hard, to be free riders
on those who succeed.
What sort of incentives do the talented have to be offered in order
to exercise their talents for the common good or for the sake of
everyone, including those on the bottom?
And the answer may vary one place to the next just what that incentive
structure has to be.
And how great the risk of free riders.
Those are important questions, but they're practical questions.
And Rawls does not rule out paying some people more and others less if
necessary for reasons of incentives, provided the rationale is that it
helps those at the bottom.
I'd like to shift to see if someone would like to pursue further a
different objection to Rawls' theory.
Not a practical objection about incentives, which is important.
But is there anyone who has a principled objection, who thinks it's
unfair because he or she thinks that the successful--
investment bankers, or runners, or basketball players, or software
inventors--
deserve the rewards that a market society heaps upon those who come up
with great achievements.
SELENA: Hi, my name's Selena.
I don't think that being born with natural assets should be equated with
being born with monetary valuation.
I think that we have a right to self ownership.
And this is very different from being born into a wealthy family.
Your natural talents are a part of your own self
worth and self ownership.
I think it's the concept of having natural inalienable rights that he
does not address.
SPEAKER 3: Rawls does address the issue of inalienable rights.
But the way he deals with it is by saying that you are allowed to
exercise your inalienable rights the way you want.
But while you exercise them, the fruits of your exercise of those
rights would go to the least advantaged.
Now this is to just correct the arbitrariness of the talents that we
may or may not be born with.
So this, in a way, really hampers our ability to exercise our free rights.
SPEAKER 4: Although we are born with certain natural talents, the reason
why society values it is based on a social conception of what is right, or
what is good, or what is bad.
That Isn't something we are born innately with as part of ourselves.
And some societies choose to favor people born with a great intellect or
more than people born with great athleticism.
And the only reason you're able to generate monetary wealth from your
natural talents is because of the way society perceives
these natural talents.
So although they are part of you, we don't fully deserve the reward that
comes from them, because it's based on everyone else's perceptions of you.
Professor Sandel: This last discussion about moral arbitrariness depends
partly on what society happens to reward.
Is that our good luck?
Or can it give rise to an entitlement?
We've also discussed effort.
Is effort really what makes success our own doing?
SPEAKER 5: I had some problems right there in the end when you said that
even effort could be considered as some kind of good fortune.
But if that's true, wouldn't it make more sense to understand every action,
every benefit, every disadvantage as fortune merely?
And then strive for a system where everyone is put every time in the very
same position.
Not only in opportunity, but also social position.
Professor Sandel: And this question is often raised against Rawls.
If you accept the argument for moral arbitrariness, does that lead to a
deterministic view about effort, so that we can never be praised or blamed
for our achievements?
SPEAKER 6: There's a basic assumption that Rawls makes that he never really
justifies, which is that we can order people based on these natural
abilities that they're given and these natural kind of inclinations towards
putting forth a greater effort than others.
I don't think that that's something that we can ever really define.
And I think it's offensive to a lot of people who would say, you can't just
order them.
And here's the most intelligent with this hierarchy.
Professor Sandel: By order them, you mean rank order them.
SPEAKER 6: Yeah.
Like Michael Jordan's at the top with his abilities.
And then there's all these other people down here.
I don't think it's anything you can ever really grasp.
In his process, he's also saying that you kind of have to
define those abilities.
So somebody born of a higher class has more opportunities, but somebody who
is born in a lower class and rose up and found success could say that it
was to their advantage that they started at the bottom, and that they
learned certain things that somebody else wouldn't.
So you can't really define which positions have more of an advantage
than others naturally.
SPEAKER 3: Effort itself is not considered to be arbitrary.
Effort is fully valued and rewarded.
It is just that the factors that influence the amount of effort we put
in as individuals of what the factors that influence this is what is
considered as arbitrary.
And secondly, the rewards that our efforts bring, assuming that they'll
all be equal, would, in fact, be different based on
what society values.
And this is also arbitrary.
So these are the two things that are arbitrary.
So our efforts in the Indian produce different results, and based on these
two arbitrary factors.
So that is what we looked at remedy as opposed to treating
effort itself as arbitrary.
So it's a different thing.
SPEAKER 7: If I take an action, and I will bear the full risk if it goes
wrong, why would it be that if it goes right, I have to share the benefit?
That seems unfair to me.
SPEAKER 8: Well, I think the whole point of Rawls' theory is that when
you do something that produces a negative result, everyone shares in
and once you make efforts, so you don't go down on your own.
Since everything's, or most of the thing is already arbitrary.
SPEAKER 10: I actually see what Rawls says as kind of like insurance in the
sense that we've talked a lot about birth.
But in reality, people with similar initial holdings, with similar
educations, similar talents, could make different decisions.
And then what Rawls is essentially saying is that we should not only
correct for--
at least, this is my understanding--
we should not only correct for the discrepancy in the initial holdings,
but also for the times when you build a business and it fails.
And a hurricane hits you, and suddenly your entire region is gone.
So there's a huge degree of randomness in life.
And I think we've sort of in the class focused a lot on birth.
And here, we're focusing on what happens after birth.
And I think that's a good discussion.
But I see what he saying is essentially we as a society are
leveraging the risk, in case something goes wrong.
Not only because you were not born with some natural gift, but just
because you took a risk.
It's not necessarily a bad bet.
But you built a business, and the hurricane hit you.
And you became a homeless person.
This says we, as a society, should leverage against that risk.
Professor Sandel: Right.
Although I think it's a powerful way of capturing the moral impulse of
Rawls' view with one exception.
I think he's not suggesting that we're leveraging the risk, but that we're
sharing the risk.
Which bears out your idea that thinking of it as an collective
insurance scheme is one way of getting at the moral impulse lying behind
Rawls' view.
KWA: I think we have to examine the role we play in such kind of
egalitarian mechanism or system.
We're actually playing the role of Atropos, like controlling other
people's destiny.
Because we are trying to fight and eliminate the [INAUDIBLE]
parts of people's life.
To eliminate exceptions, accidents, and coincidence.
We want to make everything sure.
I think it is not accessible for human beings.
Professor Sandel: So you don't like the element of society, the image of
society as a collective insurance scheme that shares
risk and pools risk.
KWA: Yeah.
And we have to think about feasibility.
Like who is going to run the system?
It certainly is not everybody.
Maybe some chosen ones.
What if they have been corrupted?
SPEAKER 11: Hi, I'm [INAUDIBLE].
Actually in Japan, we have a national insurance system that everyone, every
Japanese are virtually forced to get it.
We control the quality by the Diet or the process of
democratic decision making.
So I trust the process, making and improving the quality
of collected insurance.
Professor Sandel: When you say "the Diet," you're referring to the
Japanese legislature.
SPEAKER 11: Yes.
Professor Sandel: And so your answer is that a legislature is a political
institution that can put in place institutions, including for collective
insurance of the kind we've been discussing, and you think that can be
a way of implementing it fairly and without corruption.
Do I understand correctly?
SPEAKER 11: Yes.
I don't claim that that process can eliminate 100% the corruption.
But it's the best way to improve on the way to our best to beat the
corruption.
KWA: It's not about the legislature or censorship part.
I think the most important part is the role of people playing in
such kind of system.
Like you're trying to eliminate the destiny part of people's lives.
But I think it's not possible.
Professor Sandel: Trying to eliminate what part of people's lives?
KWA: The gifted part.
Destiny.
Professor Sandel: Gift and destiny, that a system such as Rawls'
eliminates the element of gift and destiny in life.
But I think Rawls would reply that he's not trying to eliminate the role
of gift and destiny and luck in life.
He's simply saying that those aspects of life should not determine our life
prospects, should not determine who's rich and who's poor.
That we don't need to accept, as a matter of fate, the accidents of
fortune that nature and society and history may bequeath us.
That would be his answer.
SPEAKER 12: Just because you're sharing the prize that you've gotten,
because of your natural abilities, it doesn't in any way take away the
credit of the effort that you put in.
And I don't think that some of the discussion that we've been having
takes that into account.
SPEAKER 13: I think that he said gifted.
Rawls had made some rules of gifted people for at some things.
So from my standpoint, if you are gifted, you are so [INAUDIBLE].
That is just it.
If you own business, you are [INAUDIBLE].
There is no other people.
Why you can make profit from other people.
That means if you are gifted, you are athlete, other people want to watch
your show, want to watch you running.
So you can make a profit.
That means the whole society is a cooperation system.
So I think if it is a cooperation system, you have earned a lot, and so
you should pay back.
And I think it's fair.
I think Rawls' theory of justice is fair.
Professor Sandel: All right.
So you disagree with your fellow classmate in Shanghai, with Kwa.
SPEAKER 13: I disagree with him.
I think the whole society is for the system.
Professor Sandel: Thank you for that.
We've seen that the disagreements are as lively within each local classroom
as they are across these classrooms.
Thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]
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