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Author Topic: Equality
rasmus
malcontent
Babbler # 621

posted 30 November 2003 07:12 PM      Profile for rasmus   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I've been reading a passage from Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Almost every page contained some outrageous example of rhetorical sleight-of-hand or sloppy thinking. I was a little surprised, considering his reputation for being an incisive thinker. Now, it's not that there aren't any zingers. For example, isn't there truth in it when he says that:

quote:

A society in which the position of the individuals was made to correspond to human ideas of moral merit would therefore be the exact opposite of a free society. It would be a society in which people were rewarded for duty performed instead of for success, in whhich every move of every individual was guided by what other people thought he ought to do, and in which the individual was thus relieved of the responsibility and the risk of decision. But if nobody's knowledge is sufficient to guide all human action, there is also no human being who is competent to reward all efforts according to merit.

The problem for me here, as throughout the passage, is that he seems to be responding to arguments for socialism that I rarely hear made. (His main sources on socialist thought are second-rate thinkers like Crosland, so it's not surprising.) For example, here, how many leftists really advocate that people should be rewarded according to some conception of their individual moral merit or deserts? Likewise, Hayek takes as fundamental to the argument for socialism a demand for equality. But I don't appeal to equality: that is a left liberal argument for redistribution. I appeal to notions of power, oppression, and injustice; if anything, it comes down to a right to individual autonomy as a precondition for dignity.

Even Marx did not argue from equality, but from power, if I read my Marx correctly. It is true that leftists argue against many inequalities, but it doesn't follow that the basis for the objection is inequality per se.

Amartya Sen has pointed out quite eloquently that when we speak of inequality, we must specify the equality space: inequality of what? Equalizing treatment in one respect will almost always lead to an increase in inequality in some other respect. The task is, therefore, not only to specify the equality space, but to specify why this space should dominate others in our formulation of policy. That comes down to a moral argument.

Hayek doesn't have that complex an analysis. He skirts the question of power, as right wingers usually do, through the simplifying metaphysics of individualism, which sees social choice as merely the aggregation of individual choices; and he thus doesn't have to justify why his equalities should trump others'.

[ 30 November 2003: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]


From: Fortune favours the bold | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
nonsuch
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1402

posted 30 November 2003 08:08 PM      Profile for nonsuch     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
We can cut through some philosophical and political red-tape by going back to basic principles.
Equality of what? Of the basic worth of human beings. Every newborn baby is worth exactly the same, ragardless of the status of their parents. This is a departure from Nature and depends on the big brain to make it work.
To make it work, you'd have to organize human society around the newborn: its needs, immediate and long-term; its acceptance by adults, no matter what colour and sex it may be; its chances of survival and ultimate succes, based on its own merits and efforts - its grasp useful skills and the ability to make itself liked by other humans, rather than on its economic placement at birth.
This is too tall an order. Humans are not capable of starting any experiment - most especially not a social one - from first principles.

From: coming and going | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
bittersweet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2474

posted 01 December 2003 12:37 PM      Profile for bittersweet     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Hayek's example of a society that accords status based on morality is as irrelevant as imagining a society that does it by judging only the success of actions. In the real world there is never a single means of doing this. Status is judged according to a combination of principles. They may get out of whack, but there's more than one of them. (Even within the purely moral society Hayek imagines, there would be, usually, a field of relatively acceptable options for each action, depending on the kind. Just because that society would be exclusively concerned with moral choices doesn't mean choice would be limited to a single right action in every case. Thus, it doesn't follow that all individual responsibility would be removed.) Hayek's conclusion--that no one is wise enough to judge right actions and their just deserts--is based on a society that could never be, and is therefore unhelpful. Further, the solution to it wouldn't imply swinging the pendulum to some other extreme. For example, according status purely on success.

I think leftists do advocate, consciously or not, a system of reward based, in part, on morality of action. I agree with nonesuch, that we can't construct a functioning society based on any single "first principle", no matter what it is. Adjusting a balance of first principles would best reflect our nature, because--to take the two examples of single, pure ideals described here--we are obviously not designed with the drive to be purely moral, or purely successful (however these terms may be defined).

Just as it's important to define what one means by equality, it's important to define "individual autonomy." Autonomy from what? All external moral considerations? Obviously not; again, it isn't useful to define the basis of a dignified existence according to a single ideal. Like it or not, that's not our natural orientation.

Equalizing treatment in one place may lead to unequal treatment elsewhere, but this is not necessarily only a moral situation. That's because it's likely that the judgement about what equality should outweigh another would involve considering more than a moral principle alone. In contrast, Hayek's individualist view of social choice being "an aggregation of individual choices" sounds to me a lot like the "free market", which would be a society that accords status based solely on the other side of the coin--the first principle of success. Again, that's an unnatural condition; it isn't balanced with a moral component.


From: land of the midnight lotus | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 518

posted 01 December 2003 03:50 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Very thought-provoking posts, everyone!

Rasmus mentions that Hayek's terms of reference are often second-rate socialist theoreticians such as Crosland. I recently read an essay from a law professor which argued that Hayek's references were often unnamed in his work; often the Constitutional debates of the Weimar Republic.
If that is right, then the points of reference may be Karl Schmidt and Hans J. Morgenthau, as well as Leo Strauss.

I like Rasmus' clarification concerning equality of power rather than equality of status. I am not sure, historically, that that was the common understanding; it seems too Foucaultian to belong to the 19th century. Nevertheless, it provides an exit from the argument that equality of status equals stasis/unfreedom.


Bittersweet wrote:

quote:
I think leftists do advocate, consciously or not, a system of reward based, in part, on morality of action.

You mean: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs?

Generally, I think leftists substantially reject the idea that an individual's actions ought to determine rewards. To me, that idea is too anchored in the Protestant Ethic, in which works determine grace. I would say rather that rewards ought to insure that every child born into the world has an equal chance, and if that means providing support to parents who have fewer capacities to do "moral" work, so be it. I think this is something close to what Nonesuch is arguing for, above.

[ 01 December 2003: Message edited by: jeff house ]


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged

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