Those are my tomatoes!

John Rawls was the most influential political philosopher of the twentieth century. Rawls claimed that no one deserves to be rewarded for being lucky. What does it mean to be lucky?

Sebastian inherited a tomato farm from his father. It’s a very productive farm of 2,000 acres. In his first year, Sebastian had a bumper crop and made over a million dollars.

Does Sebastian deserve all those tomatoes?

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that justice requires fairness and fairness consists of liberty and equality.

The liberty principle says that everyone should have the same fundamental freedoms. Everyone should be free and have an equal right to vote, equal access to public office and to be treated according to the rule of law.

The equality principle has two parts:

1. Everyone should have equal access to opportunity.
2. Inequality is only allowed if it helps the least well-off (this one is complicated and I will come back to it).

Rawls would say that Sebastian did not deserve to inherit his tomato farm just because he was lucky enough to have rich parents. Following the equality principle, everyone should have equal access to opportunity and most people will not inherit a tomato farm.

According to Rawls, no one deserves any reward that results from luck.

Those are my tomatoes!

Let’s consider another scenario.

More talent = more tomatoes

Theresa has a natural talent for growing tomatoes. Theresa grew up in a poor family but a teacher gave her a tomato plant when she was young. Theresa nutured that plant and discovered that she was good at growing tomatoes. Every year, she sells her tomatoes and uses the profits to buy more plants and more land to grow her tomato plants. By the time she was twenty-three, Theresa had acquired 2,000 acres and was making over a milllion dollars a year.

Does Theresa deserve all those tomatoes?

According to Rawls, none of us deserves rewards that result from ‘accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance’. Theresa was lucky to have a natural talent for growing tomatoes. Her talent is an accident of natural endowment. So, according to Rawls, Theresa does not deserve her tomato farm and she does not deserve the rewards that accrue from it.

A quick aside about the distinction between deserving a reward and being entitled to a reward: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes the following distinction (my phrasing and examples),

1. An entitlement is created by a social institution such as the rules of a lottery. If the rules say that the winner will be awarded £100, then the winner is entitled to the prize money.

2. By contrast, desert comes from a moral sense that someone deserves a reward. A team that cheats to win a World Cup quarter-final might be entitled to go through to the semi-final but they did not deserve it (I’m not still bitter, honest).

If you win the lottery, you are entitled to the winnings under the rules of the lottery, but it’s hard to say that you deserve them. According to the law, Sebastian may be entitled to his tomato farm but I’m sure we agree that he did nothing to deserve it. Sebastian did not deserve those tomatoes because no one deserves to be rewarded for the good fortune of having rich parents.

Rawls would say that Theresa does not deserve her tomato plants either because her natural talent for growing tomatoes is an accident of luck but I think Rawls is wrong on this point. I believe that someone who has a natural talent for growing tomatoes deserves the tomatoes that she grows and the profits she makes from selling them.

Here’s another case.

Hard work = more tomatoes

Miguel has no talent for growing tomatoes and he did not inherit a tomato farm from his parents. However, Miguel works hard. Theresa hires Miguel to work on her tomato farm and pays Miguel a portion of the profits. Miguel works hard and makes a lot of money from his hard work.

According to Rawls, Miguel’s predisposition to work hard also results from luck. Perhaps Miguel was born with Hard-Work genes or perhaps Miguel’s parents instilled in him the propensity to work hard. Either way, according to Rawls, Miguel was just lucky to develop a character trait that lazy people do not enjoy, and Miguel does not deserve the rewards that accrue from his hard work.

It seems to me that Rawls’s account does violence to the meaning of the word deserve. If we don’t deserve the rewards that result from talent, hard work, diligence, kindness or determination (all accidents of natural endowment or social circumstance) then the word means nothing useful at all.

I propose that, contra Rawls, we absolutely should reward talent, hard work, diligence, kindness and determination. The people who have these attributes and put them to productive use should be rewarded more highly than people who do not. I believe it’s a moral issue. Morally, I think that Theresa and Miguel deserve their tomatoes. They worked hard for their tomatoes and the tomatoes belong to them legally (entitlement) and morally (desert).

Although they do not deserve special rewards, Rawls said that talented and hard-working citizens should be entitled to additional rewards if and only if they result in benefits to the least well-off in society. This is known as the difference principle and Rawls explained it using a thought experiment.

The Veil of Ignorance

Rawls asks us to imagine that we are designing a new society from behind a veil of ignorance. We are tasked with designing the rules and institutions without knowing exactly what our position or role will be in this society. Rawls assumes that if we are armed with all the relevant information and if we think rationally about the values and principles that are important, we’ll design a society that is fair to everyone who lives in it. However, the ultimate aim of the thought experiment is not to design an actual society: it is to better understand the principles of justice. Rawls thought of the end result as ‘justice as fairness’.

From behind the veil, we know that this new society will have rich people and poor people, talented people and lazy people, strong people and disabled people but we won’t know what particular roles, skills or attributes we will have until the veil is lifted. If we knew for sure that we were going to be among the talented or hardworking we might design the laws and institutions of this new society to reward the talented and hardworking. However, since there’s a chance that we might end up talentless or unable to work, Rawls claimed that rational people would naturally prefer an egalitarian society where everyone has access to the same resources regardless of their talents or abilities.

Rawls acknowledged that, even with equality of opportunity, people with different skills will still accrue different rewards making the ideal of a perfectly equal society impossible to achieve. Rawls claimed that, even if true equality was not possible, rational people would prefer that the people at the bottom of the pile should be as well-off as possible and proposed the difference principle to ameliorate the inevitable inequality. Under the difference principle, talented and hardworking people are entitled to greater rewards only if those rewards also benefit the least well-off. Under the difference principle, it’s fine for Theresa to enjoy the rewards of her tomato farm as long as it benefits the people at the bottom of society too. These benefits might come about as the result of cheaper tomatoes at the grocery store or by redistributing some of Theresa’s tomato profits via taxation.

But those are Theresa’s Tomatoes!

To recap, Rawls claims that in a fair society, everyone will have access to the same fundamental freedoms: equality under the law, the right to vote and similar liberties. Everyone will have an equal opportunity to succeed but, due to accidents of natural endowment, some will succeed more than others. The more successful do not deserve a greater share of the rewards but, nevertheless, the state will consider them entitled to greater rewards if and only if they also generate advantages to the least well-off.

Rawls’ claim is based on the assumption that a rational person who does not know his future position in society would prefer a society that attempts to maximise equality — an egalitarian society. I believe Rawls is mistaken in this assumption.

I expect that most rational people would think 1) that hardworking and talented people deserve to be rewarded for the fruits of their labour and that 2) this would result in a fairer society. It may be the case that this would improve the conditions of those at the bottom of society but, whether that’s true or not, I expect that most people believe that a fairer society is one where people are rewarded for their hard work. That is, most people would prefer a meritocratic society to an egalitarian society.

Rawls is correct in wanting everyone to have equal access to personal liberties. I expect, too, that most people would prefer the children of poor parents to have the same opportunities to succeed as the children of rich people. In the world as it exists at present, parents instinctively want their children to inherit their wealth and other advantages but the veil of ignorance should persuade us that it would be fairer for everyone to have the same opportunities. It would make for a more efficient society too if talented and hard-working citizens have more opportunities to succeed. But I think that Rawls is wrong to want everyone — the hapless, the shiftless and the workshy — to enjoy the same rewards as the hardworking and the talented and I expect that most people, from behind the veil of ignorance, would agree.

It is often assumed that a society where rewards are based on merit will inevitably result in widespread poverty with a handful of plutocrats calling all the shots (to their own enrichment) but it does not have to be this way. Democracy should be able to choose talented leaders even if they do not come from rich families and inter-generational wealth will become a thing of the past with equality of opportunity.

An affluent society can well afford to provide for the least well-off citizens and there is no reason why anyone should have to manage without shelter, food, healthcare and equal access to education. The debate is often presented as a conflict between libertarians who are affronted by the idea that people in need have any claim on the riches of the wealthy and egalitarians who believe that everyone should be rewarded equally regardless of their contributions. However, I believe that a meritocratic society would constitute a golden mean between these two extremes and I will explore how such a society might function in a separate post.

What do you think? Is Rawls right to think that most people would prefer egalitarianism? Or do you think that people deserve to be rewarded for their contributions to society?