Cohen Gerald Allan - On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy

On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,
and Other Essays in Political Philosophy
__________________

G. A. COHEN
Edited by Michael Otsuka

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2011 by Princeton University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, G. A. (Gerald Allan), 19412009.
On the currency of egalitarian justice, and other essays in political
philosophy / G. A. Cohen ; edited by Michael Otsuka.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14870-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-691-14871-7
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Equality. 2. Capitalism. 3. Distributive justice. 4. Social
justice. 5. Communism. 6. Political sciencePhilosophy. I. Otsuka,
Michael. II. Title.
HM821.C645 2011
306.342dc22 2010020742

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CHAPTER ONE
On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice

CHAPTER TWO
Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities

CHAPTER THREE
Sen on Capability, Freedom, and Control

CHAPTER FOUR
Expensive Taste Rides Again

CHAPTER FIVE
Luck and Equality

CHAPTER SIX
Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice, And: Does Option Luck Ever Preserve Justice?

CHAPTER SEVEN
Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat

CHAPTER EIGHT
Freedom and Money

CHAPTER NINE
Mind the Gap

CHAPTER TEN
Back to Socialist Basics

CHAPTER ELEVEN
How to Do Political Philosophy

CHAPTER TWELVE
Rescuing Justice from Constructivism and Equality from the Basic Structure Restriction

AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH IN AUGUST 2009, G. A. Cohen had plans to bring together a number of his previously uncollected papers but had not yet chosen which ones to collect. This volume is an attempt to fulfill those plans. Cohens selections were to have been informed by a list of prime articles that he had compiled in 2005 while preparing a collection to be published in Chinese translation.

The five that are published here are On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat, Illusions about Private Property and Freedom, Freedom and Money, and Back to Socialist Basics. This volume brings together those and other publications, plus some unpublished material, that fall squarely within the category of contemporary political philosophy. Three of Cohens six books mentioned above have already brought together previously published papers in contemporary political philosophy. Two minor themes are the relation between property and freedom and between ideal theory and political practice. These three themes form the three parts of this book.

On the Currency, which has been reprinted as the first chapter of this book, is Cohens best-known and most widely cited article. This was the paper in which Cohen first advanced and defended his luck egalitarian thesis that the right reading of egalitarianism is that its purpose is to eliminate involuntary disadvantage. By disadvantage he meant an individuals shortfall in resources, capacities, or welfare. Such a shortfall was involuntary, on Cohens account, when it did not appropriately reflect the choices of the sufferer.

On the Currency traces its origin to a paper that Cohen prepared for a World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) symposium, The Quality of Life, in Helsinki in July 1988. The symposium paper was too long for publication as an article or book chapter, and Cohen therefore divided it into two partially overlapping parts. The larger part was published as On the Currency in 1989, and the rest of it was published as Equality of What? in the following year. The views of Ronald Dworkin and T. M. Scanlon provided the distinctive critical focus of Currency, whereas Equality of What? was oriented around the views of Amartya Sen. In bringing these two papers back together as of this volume, I have eliminated most of the overlap between them through an abridgment of Equality of What?

I have also included a previously unpublished Afterword to these two chapters that Cohen wrote in the early nineties when he intended to reprint this pair of articles as the concluding chapters of his 1995 collection Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cohen ultimately decided against publication there on grounds that these two papers detracted from that books focus on Nozick, self-ownership, and world-ownership and would be better placed in a later collection around the theme of egalitarian justice. The ideal of equality figured prominently in Cohens next two booksIf Youre an Egalitarian and Rescuing Justice and Equality. But since these works were an unanticipated flowering of a critique of Rawls that was rooted in Cohens Tanner Lectures from the early nineties, it turned out once again that inclusion of Currency and Equality of What? would have been out of place.

During his extended period of reflection on Rawls, Cohen continued to be engaged by the debate over luck egalitarianism that On the Currency (Chapters 16) of this book collects most of these subsequent articles along with the original pair.

(Sen on Capability, Freedom, and Control) consists of excerpts from a review of Amartya Sens Inequality Reexamined. I have chosen to reprint those passages which provide an illuminatingly clear and simple statement of Sens notion of capability and which expand upon Cohens critique of Sen on freedom in Equality of What?

arose as responses to criticisms of Currency by Ronald Dworkin and Susan Hurley, respectively.

Cohens was a more comprehensively luck egalitarian position than Dworkins insofar as it was opposed to unchosen disadvantage in the denomination of welfare.

(Luck and Equality) defends Cohens claim, in Currency, that a large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the effect of brute luck on distribution, where brute luck consists of differences in fortune that are not a reflection of choice.

Brute luck is to be contrasted with option luck, where the latter consists of differences in fortune that are the upshot of chosen gambles.published word on the subject, was another respect in which his version of luck egalitarianism was more thoroughly opposed than Dworkins to differences in advantage that are a matter of good or bad fortune.

The relation between freedom and property is the theme of ) of this book.

In the concluding sentence of Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain (1977), which was Cohens debut publication in normative political philosophy, he wrote that it should now be clear that libertarian capitalism sacrifices liberty to capitalism, a truth its advocates are able to deny only because they are prepared to abuse the language of freedom. Cohens subsequent writings on freedom can be seen as developments and further vindication of that early charge.

This case against libertarianism achieved refined form in the revised version of Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat (1991), which is reprinted as . The principal contention of this paper is that, while liberals and libertarians see the freedom which is intrinsic to capitalism, they overlook the unfreedom which necessarily accompanies capitalist freedom. Moreover, the socialist communalization of capitalist private property would often be in the interest of liberty itself.