People are born free, so why are they everywhere bound in chains? Rousseau starts his landmark work, The Social Contract with this question. In it Rousseau reasons that the unhappy state of human affairs derives mostly from a failure of the social contract. According to Rousseau's theory people bind themselves over to society in return for some promised good. But society fails to deliver. In other words, it's a great swindle.
He uses as a point of departure the concept of the natural man, one who has not joined society. But the concept is formulated as if man springs fully formed and educated from the naked earth. While it is easy to see Rousseau's point that there is an implicit contract among people en-masse in a large city or state, and that many of the great dissatisfactions of people living in such an organization arise from a denial of this implicit contract, the method of reasoning he uses to reach the conclusion seems wrong for a number of reasons.
We intend to argue that while man might be born free, by the time he has taken his first meal of mother's milk he has begun accruing a debt to society. It is a strange kind of debt, one that can only be discharged properly by providing for his own offspring and living in harmony with his neighbor. But it is a large and very real debt.
Man is bound to society, if not by this debt itself, then by hopes of discharging it by caring for his own children. And by the hopes of feeling a vital part of that society. We intend to argue also that Rousseau's conception of society was mistaken. Man is born into a natural society. But his dissatisfactions arise primarily from being part of a wider artificial society, one that arises from specialization made possible by particular agricultural practices as we argued in Fall of Man. He does not choose to enter society as a single, solitary free man, one sans history, hopes, ambitions, expectations, and personal relationships. Rather, he trades away a kind of natural society that actually is or is materially like, or really ought to resemble a close and caring family. And he expects in exchange a part in an artificial society that derives from specialization borne of agriculture.
When men move from the natural society to the artificial one, they do so imagining that the larger one offers the same material and psychological rewards as does the smaller one. Perhaps they understand cerebrally that they give up certain things that they value, but they frequently fail to recon the cost of the exchange.
Part of the swindle comes from the fact that compensation tends to be more in a substitutional sense than in an actual one. They are paid in money, not in kind. And sometimes that payment is insufficient to fully compensate for the trade. The working classes left the farm in droves in eighteenth century England, happy to be paid many times more in wages than they earned down on the farm. But when the costs of surviving in the city were deducted, the deal often looked much less appealing. It was this problem that motivated Marx's works.
The material rewards of the natural society are the things men take for granted if they live in tiny villages close to nature, namely the beauties of the natural world. In a dense city these may not be in evidence. And it is not long before they are sorely missed. I lived for three years in the Detroit metro area. And I understand what it is like to live where there are no parks. Michigan has many natural beauties and they are available to anyone who can drive five hours and take a few working days off. But this is categorically different from being able to take a walk each morning where there are trees and shrubs, birds singing, and the sound of the wind rustling the trees, undisturbed by the scream of fighter jets, the whistles railroad trains, the screach of police sirens and car alarms, the roar of tractor trailors, and the bone-rattling rumble of earthmoving equipment. It assumes air that smells of the must of the soil - good or bad - not of the sewer gas, decomposing mulch, the black belch of the diesel engine, the sulfurous emissions of the coal plant, wretched smell of decomposing dog, or the peculiar wreak of a grease-trap.
When people choose to uproot themselves from a small town and move to a city, they forget the attractions of nature that they leave behind. It may take some years to realize how much it is missed, but every person who has made the leap and who is honest with himself will come to realize that there is some cost to this choice. And that this cost is greater than was first reconned. Moving to the city involves, too, leaving behind a network of friends and associates that one has accumulated. This is where the psychological costs begin to be realized. It is true that many of the people who leave small towns for large cities do so feeling that, for one reason or another, they simply do not fit into those small places.
Many cities contain an assemblage of people who do not fit in smaller communities, and one entertains hope of joining a new and more suitable society, one more accepting of one's unique qualities. Often it works. But it is sometimes true that this process never quite completes itself satisfactorily. The connections one makes are sometimes not quite so durable or deep as those of childhood friends; not because there is less in common, but because man, as a fixating animal, fixates most on early experiences. The plasticity of fixation is is much diminished by age nine. By age twenty-five it is mostly gone.There is a sense in which one simply cannot forge a deep connection with a new place, its people, places, and ways, if one arrives there in midlife.This is certainly a cost that goes uncompensated. It is one very difficult to fully compensate.
If we are to be informed by the allegory of the Fall of Man, then we understand that humans are naturally fit to be bound closely into a caring society. And that the satisfactions of being human arise chiefly from this kind of close association. When it is not the family, it is some other group. The cost that requires compensation is not, as Rousseau argues, the cost of joining society. Rather, the cost is that of leaving a tightly bound and happy small society to join a new one. It is the cost of giving up a set of natural attractions in exchange for a set of more artificial ones. Artificial society does owe a debt to a person for the simple act of joining, it owes compensation in kind for what is left behind.
But more normally, the compensation for joining artificial society is monetary. Artificial society is formed around economic transactions. And those economic transactions give rise to cooperative behavior. That cooperative behavior, in turn, yields huge economic windfalls. And the question that has plagued artificial society from its inception is how to divide up that windfall in a way that is just. That is the ultimate question Rousseau is trying to answer in The Social Contract. It is the question that the Utilitarians Mill and Bentham were trying to answer. It is the question Gauthier sets out to answer in Morals by Agreement as does Rawls in A Theory of Justice .
The question needs to be answered well because the strength and durability of an artificial society derives entirely from the commitment of its members to that artifice. Compensate in too miserly a manner, and social problems start to boil over. Systematcally fail to adequately remunerate people for parting them from natural society and corporate sense of a unified society disintegrates, threatening the real thing.
On one hand, this societal debt to the individual is most effectively paid in kind, through close relationships that people forge by taking part in social institutions. Rousseau's notion of participatory government proved a crucial notion. And we, as Americans enjoy the fruits of this idea. Or might do so if more of us had read and understood his work.
On the other hand, part of the expectation of joining the greater society - the one that is created by specialists and specialization and returns to scale and efficient methods of agriculture and industrial production - is the realization of a share in the wealth created by being a part of that society. A significant part of the tension within a society arises from how the returns on cooperation, the returns that accrue to society by virtue of a person's participation, are fairly divvied up. Societies that manage to do this well tend to be happy societies. Those that adequately acknowledge and meet the material and psychological needs that would be met by a fully functioning natural societies can be strong, enduring, and generally happy ones. Artificial societies that fail by all these measures tend to disintegrate.
It might be argued that most people are not born in small, rural villages. They do not grow up in tiny, tightly-knit communities of caring, nurturing people. In fact, a tiny piece that I read recently suggested that just this year the world transitioned to one in which most people live in cities or large towns. They do not live close to nature. In short, a significant part of this concept of natural society fails to approach reality .
If one goes to places that vaguely approach this model, such as the the remote towns of people indigenous to the Amazonian Rain Forest, one might observe their inhabitants not out among nature, but huddled around a flickering television set watching Star Trek. Nor is it axiomatic that such natural societies are happy ones. It will also be argued correctly that the satisfactions of the natural society are mostly fictional, idealistic, overstated. If they were otherwise, then not all of those communal living experiements of the 1970's would have failed. Nature is not nearly so beautiful as we imagine. And it is much more terrible.
Furthermore, people in all societies are trivial and petty, stupid, selfish, inconsiderate, rude, uneducated, unrefined, boring, dishonest, shifty, unreliable, prone to rage, cold, distant, thoughtless, narrow-minded, ethnocentric, prejudiced, morose, wicked, dimwitted, and generally unlikable. So it is easy to overrate the compensations of natural society. People everywhere are flawed. But one of the great satisfactions in life is to learn to love people as much for their flaws as for their strengths. It is an idea without much currency. But it is a good one nonetheless.
People do get satisfaction out of close society regardless of flaws of character. And this satisfaction derives from close and regular contact. We will freely admit that our model society is every bit as much an artificial construct as Robinson Crusoe, the natural man construct that Nozyck invokes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We also admit that the Crusoe figure possesses an odd attraction, probably for the fact that it remains totally unbound by societal conventions or other human expectations. Finally, we agree with Locke and Nozyck that this model allows us to learn something about the nature of ownership by virtue of one's own exclusive efforts. Yet the Crusoe figure is arguably more of a fiction than our idealization of naturural society: no man arises fully formed and educated out of the naked earth. Each is a product of his society.
Even Romulus, legendary founder of Rome, was nurtured by wolves. It was not a typical natural society, but it was a natural society nonetheless. How interesting that legend should attribute the founding of arguably the most influencial civil society in the history of western civilization to a kind of Robinson Crusoe figure, a man firmly rooted in natural society. Perhaps only such a man is capable of setting high enough the level of compensation for joining artificial society. Perhaps only such a person is capable of correctly reconning the cost. Sometimes the man who stands on the shore perceives the oceans more profoundly than the fish who live in them. Sometimes society is most clearly seen from beyond its edges.
Humans crave society. The best proof is proof by counterexample. Among the severest punishments that can be inflicted on men is the punishment of solitary confinement. It is assumed within the penal system that every prisoner enjoys company of thieves and murderers far better than he takes to the state of solitude. And it would seem that this belief is held because it is so. People who interact with nobody tend to be the sadder for the fact. Even people who pursue solitary crafts such as painters will frequently be found to live vibrant, gregarious social lives. Picasso for example.
By this measure, Robinson Crusoe proves to be a seriously flawed premise for social theory. How do we deal with the issue that most people are born into the post-agrarian societies that we call here artificial societies? Most people do not actually choose to move from natural societies to artificial ones. Or is that true? By some measure the family is a natural society. And many people leave their families for other compensations. So even in an urban setting there is as sense of the natural society and the artificial one. To the extent that children in their twenties and thirties remain at home without other strong societal attachments suggests a growing failure of society to attract people who have a reasonable alternative. It suggests a growing failure of the social contract.
Yet few families are actually capable of passing to their children the natural society that they embody. The reasons are many and complex and have little to do with this discussion. There is a sense that most people born in urban or suburban settings do not realistically have the choice of following directly in their parent's footsteps. They find the prospects of natural society so impoverished that artificial society would have to offer little to create a better circumstance. In short, most people don't really see it as a choice. There really is no alternative.
Even in Rousseau's day, if one were to quit the world of artificial society, one would have to sail to the new world and live among the "savages." Therein lies the problem. Contracts only deal with voluntary dealings. They assume that one enters a contractual relationship on a purely voluntary and rational basis, without being threatened, or misled, or pressured, or cajoled. It assumes that the alternative to entering into a contract is viable.
If a person must enter into a contract to stay alive, it is hard to argue that such a contract is entered upon voluntarily. That, in fact, is one of the definitions of involuntary. Contracts that are made under threat are invalid. The threat nead not be loss of life. Contracts do not bind those who are deceived or forced involuntarily into the agreement.
The contractual theory is an artifice: there is no actual contract for joining artificial society. But it is an important artifice, because if we build an artificial society that no person would choose to join, would we not be building a terrible thing? Or if we built a society that is bad enough that it makes a reasonably small portion of people wish they were dead, is that not a terrible thing? Or if we built a society that possesses a level of injustice in which people blow themselves up simply to make a statement about the level of injustice, would that not also be a terrible thing?
So we must imagine that this contractual sense is important. The fundamental notion of a contract is an exchange of voluntary performance. Person A commits to perform in a certain way and person B commits to perform in a certain way. A and B both expect certain benefits to accrue from this cooperative performance. And those benefits are divided in rough accordance with what each brings to the agreement.
To a significant degree it was a queston of how the benefits of the cooperative effort of artificial society are divided among its members that motivated Rousseau's work. And it has been a question addressed by many workers since. In the natural society, there is a strong communal sense. When people bring to the communtity material excesses these are shared, and the person who brings them is typically rewarded with other considerations.
In the artificial society, common talents generally bring disproportionately small returns, uncommon talents sometimes bring disproportionately large returns. The returns are frequently monetary. They may take the form of fame or elevated reputation.
No person who has written seriously in this field since Locke seriously disputes that a person ought to be remunerated for his efforts. The consequence of doing so is manifestly unjust society. So unjust as to be essentially dysfunctional, essentially unfit to be called society. But not all remuneration that one receives in artificial society is by virtue of one's own efforts. Most, in fact, is highly dependent upon the efforts of others.
Some portion derives from legacies and endowments ( an old dam or canal, a road, a house well built long ago, a park, a valuable vein of ore, the mineral rights to the land on which it is found). Some derives from the function of institutions ( business, hospitals, fire departments) . Some derives from capital (machines that multiply the efficiency of labor.)
Now it happens that in the contracting process adults agree to trade their labors for wages and other considerations. Adults who manage to convince the agents of this artificial society that their skills are both rare and valuable command larger fees. Those who do not, accept smaller ones. Again, few serious writers in this field assert today that there is another solution to the problem, some efforts are more valuable to society than others.
The problem of this approach becomes evident when one approaches it from a contracting point of view. The current practice works as if a person chooses his talents. It works as if a person chooses all of the conditions that exist when he sits down to negotiate his wage. Many serious workers in the field blithely pretend that it is so. But which person chooses to be born? Which person chooses his parents? Which person chooses his genes? Which person chooses his natural capacities? Which person chooses the nation into which he is born? Which person chooses his parents' social class? Which person chooses the age into which he is born or the social customs and practices of that age? Which person chooses the zip code in which his parents live? Which person chooses his parents friends, associates, and institutions of membership? Which person chooses which schools and teachers he will have? Which person chooses the people with whom he will get along in school? Which person chooses to look plain or ugly to most others? Which person chooses to be sickly, weak or unenergetic? Which person chooses to be afflicted with diseases that debilitate him or to get injuries that make much work for which he would be otherwise fit out of the question? Which person has complete and arbrirary choice over which institutions he will be part of after school? Which person has arbitrary choice over how they will approach the contracting stage as an adult?
While it is true that many of the specific outcomes remain to be determined by the time one enters artificial society as an adult, one's possibilities have been materially circumscribed by pure hazard. There might be billions of possible trajectories for a person at the point of joining society, but probably those that remain possible amount to less than one part in 10 raised to 100 power compared to the possibiltities that exist for some hypothetical, arbitrary human being who exists only in the imagination of a novelist or essayist or philosopher.
So while it is true that some choice does exist, the assumption of choice, upon which contract theory might be based is materially false. There exist no viable alternatives to entering the contract. And the starting position for negotiation is, to a profound degree, a matter of pure hazard.
Because of these facts, it is unrealistic to suggest that man enters artificial society in a purely voluntary basis. That he enters it as the result of some fairly reasoned negotiation between equals is a fiction. And it is unrealistic to argue that the outcome of the negotiation is primarily a result of a person's choices.
The process presumes three falsehoods, and because of this society too frequently offers an individual a rotten deal. This is not a result of a failure of contract theory itself. It is a result of our failure to rightly acknowledge the ways in which the real problem diverges from its simplest idealization.
We would argue that contract theory, when it takes into consideration issues of hazard as Rawls does in his concept of "veil of ignorance" can be of great use in helping us determine whether the material benefits of artificial society are allocated fairly. But we also argue that to imagine that this is the singular, ultimate end of social justice is to fail to acknowledge the limited role that economic justice plays in society. We argue that economic justice is more important for what it symolizes than for what it actually is. Namely, it symbolizes a proper and respectful regard of all classes and groups of people for all other classes and groups.
But even the contracting issue misses the point somewhat. People contribute to society not because they expect something back but because that is the way people are. People do expect something back not so much because they contribute as because it is symbolic of being part of society. Participation in natural society is relational, not transactional. And this is the natural expectation that people have of artificial society.
The British notion of "position" or "place' comes much closer to describing the notion than the American notion of "job." In a way it is ironic since "positions" tended to pay in a more miserly way than "jobs." But part of the difference was a kind of social insurance kept by the employer that would to some extent shield the employee from minor business setbacks that in contemporary America inevitably cause layoffs.
It is a categorical mistake to assume that a person sees pay exclusively as being an exchange for work done. Rather, pay is a symbol of being a member of an artificial society in a particular capacity. In a similar way, people expect to be part of society in other meaningful ways. They expect their roles to be meaningful, to make a difference. Fulfilling society is not transactional. It is relational. The transaction serves as proxy for the relationship.
Where society fails to provide satisfaction it is freqently by making the categorical mistake of thinking that economic transactions are fundamentally economic in nature, and purely transactional. And it is here where laissez affaire capitalism fails to apply to social theory. We argue elsewhere that it is almost impossible to find an economic transaction that actually satisfies the assumptions that underlie laissez affaier captitalism, so instead of it being a powerful general economic theory, it is a weak and isolated one. A kind of special case, or a point of departure in studying theories that are more representative of actual economic behavior. But we suggest here that what economic behavior that is legitimately covered by that idea along with much of the behavior and the ecomomic behavior that the theory claims illegitimately as its own is actually not properly understood purely in the transactional language of economic theory. Laissez affaire capitalism is not just a rather poor excuse for general economic theory, it is of almost not explanatory value when it comes to explaining the real satisfactions and disaffections with artificial society. To the extent that it is explanatory it is due in large part to the proxy effect we mentioned.
I am reminded of a story I read recently of an assembly-line worker. A manufacturing engineer for a car company noticed that a particular stud was regularly missing in the body of a certain model car. The problem would be noticed far down the assembly line when the stud was used to mount other vital equipment. Autos that did not have this stud had to be pulled from the assembly line and reworked. And the rework was very expensive. He determined that there was a particular assemblyline worker who was responsible for that missing stud. When other workers were in that same position, they always installed the stud correctly.
So one day he took that worker to the station where that stud was used to mount other equipment, and explained how the fact that it was missing would lead to costly rework and delays. "Oh," commented the worker, "now I understand. I didn't think it was important." And the problem disappeared.
At the deepest level, the problem was one of a person failing to completely grasp how their own actions proved vitally important to the success of the society they were part of. The question was not about how the job was defined. The issue was not "you must insert this stud because it is your duty." The issue was that inserting the stud was an act that added value to society. It was an act with societal importance. Realizing that societal importance dignified the act. The assmbly worker was paid for doing his job, yes. And the worker would not work without pay, probably.
Similarly, if the worker refused to install the stud he would lose his job. But pay was not the whole reason for work. Nor would the stud problem itself be the reason for firing. Pay did not motivate work. Nor did duty. Nor was pay the whole reward. Part of the reward lay in belonging to an institution, a society of people who made cars. Part of the reward lay in knowing one was making a valuable contribution to society. Understanding how this stud symbolized that was vital to solving the problem. The contract with the worker surely did not mention the stud. Nor could any contract have fully described all of the workers duties. In the end, the system functioned because of its societal nature, its resemblance to natural society.
When Russia reorganized in the 1990s there were a number of cases in which people reported to their jobs and did them with the normal amount of care and diligence for many weeks or even many months without getting paid. Why? Because they saw this as being their role in society. Yes, they probably did expect to be paid eventually. And as the time without pay ceased to be measured in months but started to be measured in years, the behavior changed. But were pay the only reason to be at work, they would have left much earlier. They left not because of lack of pay, per se, but because of what that symbolized. It symbolized a failure of society.
These stories illustrate that people expect more from work than a paycheck. And they generally derive more from it. Work societies are a special kind of artificial society. They can tell us much about how cultures relate the work experience to the greater artificial society.
Germans who work in the United States are surprised by the informality of the workplace. They imagine work to be primarily a place to work, with other institutions providing other opportunities to be part of society. Germans imagine going to work, working intensely for the duration, and returning home at reasonable hours to take part in other societal roles. And they insist on getting six weeks off for vacation. They are paid very well, and for some years, until very recently, Germany was the world's leading exporting nation.
Germans see Americans socializing and chatting at work and are aghast at how little work gets done during normal working hours. Perhaps German society, as does Japanese society, views work as a kind of sacred social act. In the German mind it might be a duty. But in the Japanese mind it might be more of a religious ritual. Both of these attitudes connect the acts of work with society in a rather profound way that Americans completely miss. Sure, there is a Puritannical ideal about working hard and long. But sometimes it applies more to putting in hours than in
A friend works in a financial institution in NYC. He notes that people tend to show up at 10:00AM. They socialize until roughly 4:00, then they order out for sandwiches, go to their cubicles, and start their work. At ten or eleven they go home feeling self-righeous for putting in a fourteen or fifteen hour day, though they have actually worked for about six hours. It would be a mistake to assume that what transpires between 10:00 and 4:00 adds no value either to society or to the institution paying these employees, Their social interactions bind them to each other, to their society, and to the institution that pays them. And their social cohesion will prove invaluable as they percolate up throught the various financial institions they will serve. But it is a uniquely American solution to the problem of a kind of paucity of institutions outside of work by which people can share a rich and fulfilling social life. And it involves a rather profound degree of self-deception.
We have argued so far that the expectation of people in an artificial society is that they be made to feel a legitimate and useful part of that society. Part is fair and effective government. Part is a livable environment. Part is fair pay and a sense of inclusion in vital institutions.
Rousseau, we presume, imagined that if one got the governmental part right, the rest might follow. That, one might reasonably argue, was what he was talking about when he argued for democracy and the means of determining the a corporate will of the people. It was a reasonable assumption. And it might be correct. But if it is correct, it is so for the wrong reason.
The only way to get the governmental part right is to have a well educated, enligthened society, a society both well informed and capable of complex ethical reasoning. In such a society, government and other institutions would reflect this good reasoning, and all three issues would naturally be addressed reasonably well. Good government is the product of good ethical reasoning informed by a strong sense of empathy. When it ceases to be this, it becomes little more than an institution of the powerful taking advantage of the less powerful.
It was to this condition the Rousseau was objecting in The Social Contract . Proper moral thought would suggest that, to the extent that artificial society makes people more miserable than they would be in a more natural state, it is actively evil. In religious language, artificial society in this case is responsible for a sin of commission. To the extent that artificial society fails to make people as happy as the society is capable of making them, it is neglectful. In this case, artificial society is responsible for a sin of omission. Why should we care? Why should we be engaged in the question about how people derive satisfaction from their society?
There are two personal reasons. One is because caring in and of itself humanizes us. It brings us into artificial society in a capacity that is similar to how we would rightly and most happily enter into a relationship with natural society. Unhappy natural societies fail in this respect. The second reason is because acts that result from our caring may occasionally touch other people's lives in favorable ways. Caring might sometimes actually make a difference.
There is also one societal reason. A society that fails too profoundly to look after the needs of the most miserable 20% of its population fails in profoundly miserable ways. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions spring to mind. In all of these cases, the event was the natural and almost inevitable product of centuries of neglect of the social contract. Rousseau wrote decades before the French revolution. And his reasoning was based not only on contemporary Paris, but historic Paris. The societal abuses of the lower classes were old by his time.
But lesser calamities befall societies for the same kinds of careless practices. There are good reasons to argue that such was the cause of the Great Depression. And if we find conditions deteriorating for the average person in America today, it is once again for many of the same reasons. We do not wish this argument to be confusing. The social reason to act responsibly is not because of the threat of social upheaval. Threats are managed.
The social reason is simply that ill-treatment eventually causes social upheaval. Like gravity eventualy causes things at high elevations to move toward sea level. There is an inevitablity to the problem, at least so long as enough people in high places ignore it. One can only manage social dissatisfaction for so long. It is a symptom of profound dysfunction. Once things start to go over the edge, there is no stopping them. One understands this better by having a slight acquaintance with the French Revolution.
By the time of the French Revolution, every person who was anyone spent almost all his time in Paris angling to get closer to the monarch. For the monarch was the source of all political, economic, and social power in France. People were judged almost singularly on their abilities to gain social and political powers through their machinations at court. Those with most power tended to be those best at machinations. And those would tend to be the most ambitious.
So when Louis XVI came to power and showed profound political weaknesses, a significant portion of the French uppercrust was happy enough to throw him to the wolves. They imagined they might exploit the situation to their advantage, maybe end up monarch. In this sense, the monarch had very few reliable friends or allies. An abusive system of government had bred an abusive ruling class. An exploitative government had bred an exploitative ruling class. The revolution may have been triggered by students, intellectuals, and the disaffected working classes, but it was exploited by the ambitious in high places. This would be a natural result of a governmental system that was fundamentally exploitative. One that profoundly denied the existence of a social contract.
Woody Allen quipped long ago that eighty percent of success is showing up. At one level the idea strikes one as outrageous because it seems to deny the importance of natural capacities, of expertise, and of hard work. But if one lives in a place where showing up proves to be a matter of some hazard, one begins to understand the issue. A person brings to society what he can. And in a well-run society these capacities are used to best advantage.
In functional societies people find places that make the most of what they bring to society. In dysfunctional societies, by contrast, entitlement of the rich and powerful tends to make it more difficult for people to progress on the basis of merit. People who do show up, who do have training, who do have expertise, who do work hard are overlooked for political reasons. But in a fair society one shows up. By showing up, we mean that people contribute in accordance with their natural gifts and talents. We also mean in a rather profound sense, in accordance to his own pleasure.
The contribution properly ought to be pleasurable. Not in the sense of a nice soak in the hot tub, but in the sense of gaining real satisfaction from a job well done. Each person has natural gifts and talents. While there is not a perfect correspondence between talents and places in society, in a well-managed society there might be multiple institutions that allow people to contribute in various ways, not always for monetary compensations. A person's obligation to himself as a part of an artificial society is to join institutions and contribute to them in ways consistent with his talents.
The talent of showing up is one that ought not be underestimated. Though far from being sufficient for fulfilling obligations, it is necessary. Apart from this, people's obligations are to the preservation of the goods that society offers, and a commitment to being able to see its ills and work to overcome them. One assumes a commitment to working cooperatively to improve one's own lot. And to do the same for others through this effort. It would be convenient to define obligations and duties in some closed and formal sense. The duty to vote, the duty to support loved ones, and so on. But enumeration of these has too many problems. Proper action flows naturally from proper thought, proper attitude. People having different capacities and living in different natural settings will naturally define for themselves different natural duties and obligations.
So we get to the end of the argument and what are we left with? Not much, really. Show up. Be kind. It is what individuals owe society. As for what society owes individuals? Be kind. Treat the least of society as you would be treated. All the other rules flow from this. These maxims suggest the goal of a fair and just society.
How does one judge whether a society is just? John Rawls in A Theory of Justice develops a whole method to do just this. Early on one engages in a thought experiment that takes proper account of the hazards that affect the contracting outcome but over which a person has not choice. The idea he refers to as "veil of ignorance." Think of all of the things that determine who you are as a person that are not consequences of your own choices. Your parents, your society, and so on. Now imagine that you have not yet been born. The conditions of every single person on this planet are or may be potentially known to you. You could choose, for instance, to be born into a prominent Boston family, one rich, influencial powerful, and endowed with great intelligence and charm. You could be born into a poor immigrant family in Bronx, one that understands or speaks not a word of English. You could be born into an impoverished rural Indian family. You could be born in a tiny Siberian town. And so on.
Effectively, Rawls system of thought asks the question, "under what condition would you be indifferent to the choice?" What would have to be true about all of these situations in order for you to not care? What would have to be true in order that, after you have made the choice, you do not say "No, I definitely would rather have lived under other circumstances?" In a completely fair society, greater responsibilities might imply greater pressure on one's person, greater intrusion on one's personal life, loss of privacy, and so on. And all of these things might be compensated by greater wealth or influence.
Rawls postion is that in real societies, certain positions might be overcompensated. Insurance salesman, physician, or corporate CEO might be examples. In some real societies certain positions might be undercompensated, short-order cook or waitress, for example.* In some societies children might be pressed into labor by their parents, compromising their eductional opportunities. The only compensation for such a swindle would then be to carry it out on the next generation. Would that be a society into which one would choose to be born? If not, then what geographical and cultural forces predispose this behavior? Is there a societal solution that makes this all more fair?
Not everyone is likely to make the judgment in the same way. But to the extent that there were substantially more people who chose to be doctors in this game than there was need for doctors in a society, it would be indicative of a society that overcompensated doctors either by reputation or by pay or by both. The harm in this is that some people will choose the profession less because of their interests and aptitudes than because they feel able to exploit an unfairness of the system by becoming a doctor.
This degrades the moral authority of the position and it degrades the effectiveness of the practitioners. Everyone loses. The cost is not just the opportunity cost associated with overpayment of doctors and the resulting unavailability of funds for fund public health programs that we know for a fact would have more impact. Unjust society has financial costs. A trillion dollars wasted in Iraq might be a starting point for that argument.
But injustice's greater costs lie in societal dissatisfaction. It festers and causes societal fevers and aches. And if it is not excised by carefully and designed acts of fairness, the injury may turn cancerous and bring society to an end.
The council of Jimmy Stewart's character in the movie about an imaginary friend, Harvey, comes to mind. Paraphrased, it might sound like this. "You can make your way in the world in one of two ways, either by being really smart, or by consistently being kind." Smartness devoid of kindness, if it does not breed failure, breeds discontent. So long as we fail to show kindness in our determination of national policy we shall be bound by the chains of discontent.
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* We are struck at this point by a realization that Nozyck in "Anarchy, State and Utopia" has got it wrong once again. He spends some effort objecting to the imposition some arbitrary, fixed income-distribution system. But Rawls does not do this Rawls is actually trying to rationalize the marketplace. He is actually making the argument that the free market assumes we have free choice over a body of things that, in fact, we do not have free choice over: who our parents are, into what nation we are born, into which zip code. He is simply arguing, "suppose our condition were, as economic theory assumes, completely based upon our rational choices, what would the marketplace look like?"
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2007. All Rights Reserved