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Egalitarianism and Perceptions of Inequality Derrick Darby, Nyla R. Branscombe
Philosophical Topics, Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 7-25 (Article)
Published by University of Arkansas Press
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pht/summary/v040/40.1.darby.html
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 40, NO. 1, SPRING 2012
Egalitarianism and Perceptions of Inequality
Derrick Darby University of Kansas
Nyla R. Branscombe University of Kansas
ABSTRACT: Drawing on social psychological evidence showing that the perspective from which the economically advantaged and disadvantaged view economic inequalities matters a great deal for how they are appraised, for when they are considered unfair, and for what evidentiary standards individuals rely upon to reach their conclusions, we argue that choice egalitarianism is unsuitable for articulating the demands of justice when people not only disagree about the causes of inequality but also have motivated reasons to adopt different standards for appraising its fairness. Because choice egalitarianism requires us to take a stand on the causes of inequality it is an unsuitable ideal. This is a serious shortcoming when we are interested in getting people to assume collective responsibility for doing something about inequality in the real world.
Social psychologists have shown that the perspective from which the economically advantaged and disadvantaged view economic inequalities matters a great deal for how they are appraised. Perspective plays a role in whether individuals consider inequalities to be unfair or unjust and it dictates what evidentiary standards they rely upon to reach their conclusions. In addition, these “differential injustice standards,”
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as we shall call them, have consequences for how the advantaged and disadvantaged attribute causal responsibility for inequality. These social psychological outcomes concerning varying social perspectives, appraisals of inequality, and standards of injustice obtain in nonideal circumstances, i.e., ones in which we consider how people actually think and behave. Our collaboration is informed by the belief that this empirical data has important implications for philosophical theorizing about egalitarian justice. And we aim to develop one such implication in this article. We argue that appraising inequality using a choice egalitarian framework is not particularly well suited for encouraging some people to take collective responsibility for doing something about group-based inequality given what we know about how people think about the causes of inequality and how they behave when assessing it.
I. THE CAUSES OF INEQUALITY The Economist reports that nearly 5 percent of America’s national income goes to the top .01 percent of Americans with an average income of $24 million. The United States Congressional Budget Office confirms that the rich are indeed getting richer and the income gap between them and lower-income earners is increasing. The average net household income of the richest 1 percent grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 whereas it only grew by 18 percent for the poorest 20 percent of the population. During this same period the 1 percent brought home more than 17 percent of the total after-tax income, while the poorest 20 percent earned merely 5 percent of it. The ethical status of inequality is hotly debated. There is considerable disagreement about what, if anything, we are obliged to do about the income gap between the rich and the rest. A longstanding argument in favor of income inequality holds that it is necessary for economic growth because the prospect of becoming rich provides an incentive for some people to work harder and to produce more of the goods, services, and opportunities that we all need and desire. But critics of inequality take their cue from recent evidence suggesting that income inequality is bad for our health and for democracy, that it undermines political stability, reduces levels of social trust, lowers life expectancy, adversely impacts educational achievement and attainment, and increases the crime rate among numerous other negative effects (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). When combined with evidence that inequality is actually bad for growth (Stiglitz 2012), these negative effects certainly provide strong grounds for objecting to income inequality. But none of this evidence took center stage during the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Here the central objection was that the income and wealth gap between the 1 percent (the rich) and the 99 percent (the rest) was unfair. This attention to fairness invites us to consider yet another obstacle to achieving some consensus on how to address income inequality, namely that people rely
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upon different standards for determining when an inequality is unfair depending upon their social group membership. And this, as we will argue, tells against tethering collective responsibility for doing something about inequality to attributions of causal responsibility for inequality. It was not at all surprising that those working on Wall Street and those occupying it had diverging views about the unfairness of income inequality. Intuitively, this is something that one might expect. The 1 percent, perhaps focused on the notion that inequality fosters economic growth and prosperity, will embrace one kind of confirmatory standard for when income inequality should be deemed unfair. And it is likely to be a rather strict standard insofar as they are worried about liability to being taxed to aid the rest and to close the income gap; they are also concerned about being assigned blame or causal responsibility for the unfortunate predicament or bad brute luck of the rest. The 99 percent, perhaps focused on all that they contribute to make it possible for the rich to enjoy their extravagant lifestyles, will adopt a different standard. And their standard is likely to be less strict in terms of the amount of evidence needed to declare income inequality unfair insofar as they want the rich to shoulder some share of collective responsibility for closing the income gap. Inequality is a sign of the times but so too are disagreements over its causes and severity. For instance, when considering income and wealth inequality we know that the economically advantaged tend to attribute their success to hard work, thrift, and initiative, while they believe a deficit of these virtues explains the plight of the disadvantaged. This self-serving attributional pattern serves to confirm that the existing distributive patterns and social arrangements and their advantaged place within them is just (Loughnan et al. 2011). Furthermore, we also know that disagreements over the severity and causes of inequality appear along gender (Brandt 2011) and racial lines (Hunt 2007). Let us briefly remark on the race case. Between 1977 and 2004, the proportion of whites blaming racial inequality on blacks lack of effort, motivation, or will increased from 21 to 27 percent, which is more than double the percentage of whites that take lack of access to a good education to be the main cause (Bobo and Charles 2009; Hunt 2007). In contrast, during the same period, nearly two-thirds of blacks and 60 percent of Latinos cite structural rather than agency-based explanations as the main cause of racial inequality and minority disadvantage. Although recent work has shown that matters become more complicated when we consider additional factors of minorities such as class status, geographical location, religious background, and educational attainment, there are still measurable differences in racial attitudes concerning the causes of racial inequality and racial disadvantage (Hunt 2007). Causal explanations of inequality typically take one of three forms. Liberal explanations tend to emphasize social factors such as discrimination, inequality of opportunity, and impersonal market forces such as the spatial mismatch between good jobs and access to them. Conservative explanations often point to behavioral factors such as individual motivation, cultural membership, and values to explain
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these things. And then there are explanations of inequality that combine social and behavioral factors (Wilson 2009). In addition to correlating with attributions of praise and blame and views about who can be made to bear the burden of inequality on grounds of justice, these different explanations also contribute to divergence of opinion on public policy matters (Bobo 2001). One way to sum up the foregoing empirical findings is by noting that blacks and Latinos, although far from being a homogenous group on these matters, tend to favor more liberal explanations of racial inequality and racial disadvantage, while whites, although far from being homogenous, tend to favor more conservative explanations. As Bobo (2001) explains: “For minorities, especially Blacks, it is understood that the persistence of race problems has something to do with how our institutions operate. For many Whites, larger patterns of inequality are understood as mainly something about minorities themselves” (282). It may certainly be taken as a sign of social progress that more whites now believe that black disadvantage is not due to innate differences in intelligence or ability, or to being a member of an allegedly inferior race, but rather to blacks’ presumed lack of motivation or work ethic. Although this is far from adequate, this “progress” means that many more whites will be inclined to entertain policies that target these presumed causes of inequality and disadvantage. Yet in our nonideal world in which we must consider what people actually think and how they behave, as Bobo (2004, 20) observes: “One cannot escape the conclusion that most whites have different and decidedly lesser views of the basic behavioral characteristics of blacks than do blacks themselves. And that generally these patterns indicate that African Americans remain a culturally dishonored and debased group in the American psyche.” How should we chart our course to a more egalitarian world in view of this attitude survey data? More specifically, is choice egalitarianism well suited for grounding our understanding of the demands of egalitarian justice when we consider evidence of deep disagreement about the causes of inequality and differential judgments across social groups?
II. CHOICE EGALITARIANISM Many egalitarians concede that pursuing equality of welfare, primary goods, capabilities, resources, opportunity, or advantage must be tempered by proper regard for competing moral values. They grant that equality is not the only thing that people care about. To paraphrase Cohen (1989, 906), egalitarians acknowledge that the price individuals and society must pay to mitigate objectionable inequality— such as compromising other values like freedom—must not be intolerable. So, if distributive justice demands that we mitigate inequality of opportunity for welfare (Cohen’s preferred currency of egalitarian justice) then we must take account of the
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value of freedom in pursuit of this normative aim. Although there will certainly be disagreement about what is or is not “intolerable” in particular cases, sensible egalitarians advocate pursuing greater equality within certain constraints. Suppose that freedom is indeed a value that egalitarians must take seriously as their libertarian critics reliably demur. How have egalitarians tempered the pursuit of distributive equality by taking account of freedom? Although not without controversy, some egalitarians have proposed that we assign ethical significance to the distinction between people’s choices and their circumstances where the latter are sometimes described as matters of pure brute luck. A person’s circumstances such as family background, parental educational attainment, or neighborhood born into are not the only things that can be a matter of brute luck, so can their talents and abilities. Hence circumstances can cover both arbitrary factors about a person’s social environment as well as ones pertaining to their natural endowments. Whether a person’s abundance or deficiency of distributive shares is largely shaped by circumstances or by their choices should make a difference to our assessments of the justice and injustice of unequal distributions from this egalitarian vantage point. Insofar as sensitivity to people’s choices is presumed to be a way of taking freedom seriously, these egalitarians make good on their aim to ensure that the pursuit of greater equality is tempered by regard for freedom. Because of the centrality of choice in this approach to egalitarian justice, we shall henceforth refer to it as choice egalitarianism and its proponents as choice egalitarians. But we should add that within the philosophical literature this view is most often referred to as luck egalitarianism and its proponents described as luck egalitarians. We depart from this nomenclature because choice seems to more aptly capture the ethical core of this approach as Cohen (2011, 117), who is a leading choice egalitarian, confirms: “What have come to be known as ‘luck egalitarians’ focus on the difference between people’s advantages, and they count that difference just if and only if it accords with a certain pattern in the relevant people’s choices.” In his most widely discussed defense of choice egalitarianism, Cohen (2011, 29) contends: “In my view, a large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the influence of brute luck on distribution.” While Cohen clearly invites being described as a “luck egalitarian,” in the same passage, he adds: “Brute luck is an enemy of just equality, and since effects of genuine choice contrast with brute luck, genuine choice excuses otherwise unacceptable inequalities.” For Cohen, and other choice egalitarians, choice is an excusing condition: presumptively unjust unequal distributions will prove to be just if they stem from (are caused by) choices. Thus choice egalitarians will distinguish themselves not only by how they characterize the currency of egalitarian justice, but also by how they qualify the nature or content of excusing choices: they may require that persons identify with these choices (Dworkin 2000), or that they be choices made in view of relevant information about their likely effects (Arneson 1989; Cohen 1989), or that they be choices similarly situated persons would not have made (Roemer 1996).
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Critics have taken issue with choice egalitarianism on various grounds. Some have opined that it misses the real point of equality (Anderson 1999). Other critics argue that it pays insufficient attention to legal practices of accommodation where we relax our emphasis on choice-sensitivity to accommodate other important values such as autonomy (Shiffrin 2004). And still other critics have argued that choice egalitarianism relies on a morally implausible distinction between choices and circumstances and that it concedes too much ground to libertarians and the political right (Scheffler 2005). Some critics have advanced the moral implausibility thesis by arguing that choice egalitarianism does not square with our ordinary moral intuitions in a wide range of hypothetical cases. For instance, in one category of cases (often referred to as the abandonment cases) this view is alleged to require that we not assist or compensate persons who find themselves worse off due to their imprudent or even prudent choices. So, for example, assuming that everyone has equal opportunity to run a particular risk, in cases where an individual finds herself with an urgent medical need that can be traced to her own negligence or high-risk behavior such as motorcycling without a helmet we would not normally view this as a legitimate basis for denying her the medical care she needs. By the same token, we are not normally inclined to deny someone assistance if their urgent needs stem from prudent or rational choices that have unfortunate outcomes such as a homeowner who suffers a self-inflicted gun shot wound in trying to fend off a home invader, or the poor working mother who drops medical insurance for her children to pay for food and shelter and is then unable to pay for unexpected urgent medical care for them (Anderson 1999). Some critics contend that choice sensitive egalitarianism generates injustices in many such cases and implications contrary to our everyday moral intuitions, though these critics acknowledge that different versions of the view might fare better or worse in these cases. Choice egalitarians might deflect this objection by stressing that individuals are only required to bear the full costs of their ideally considered choices, namely ones that would be made after thorough-going deliberation about their preferences, where there are no mistakes in reasoning, where they have all the information pertinent to their choices, and where their preferences are not adaptive to oppressive circumstances (Arneson 1989). And to this one might add that imprudent choices actually provide evidence that these and other relevant constraints on ideally considered choices have not been met, which entails that individuals who make imprudent choices are due compensation or assistance (Kaufman 2004). An obvious problem with this response, however, is that it seems to entail that compensation or assistance in most real world cases is a foregone conclusion since this demanding constraint may never be met in practice. Choice sensitive egalitarians might also raise questions about the implications of the abandonment cases. While critics take these cases to impugn the moral plausibility of the view, it has been observed that they do so by invoking additional normative constraints such as basic needs, which choice sensitive egalitarians need not
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reject. For instance, Tan (2008) offers a defense of choice sensitive egalitarianism that justifies leaving individuals to bear the burden of their choices only after their basic minimum needs are met. He contends that the proper domain of choice egalitarianism is merely to provide a moral grounding principle for distributive justice, that is, a normative justification for when the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens distributed within the basic structure of society are permissible and when they are not. Choice egalitarianism is not meant to serve as a comprehensive moral ideal. Hence Tan (2008, 676) concludes: “Assuming a division of moral domains, luck egalitarians can easily accept arguments based on, say, basic rights, that persons deprived of basic needs retain a principled claim to assistance in spite of their own bad choices.” This strategy renders choice egalitarianism compatible with a broad range of welfare, safety net, and disaster relief policies, and also serves to sharply distinguish it from versions of libertarianism that rule out such policies. But for some choice sensitive egalitarians it will seem like a much too costly way of answering the abandonment cases. While some defenders of choice sensitive egalitarianism have no problem with this morally modest interpretation of the scope of the theory, others maintain that it is better for choice sensitive egalitarians to bite the bullet in these abandonment cases, and to argue that this stance squares with their core moral commitment to respect persons and to take individual liberty seriously (Stemplowska 2008). Setting the foregoing objections to one side, however, we wish to further object that the choice-circumstance distinction is analytically oversimplified and so cannot handle empirical explanations of inequality that posit a causal interplay between these two factors. For instance, in recent work on inequality of opportunity in Latin America, economists have attended to the task of decomposing inequality into choice and circumstance variables (Crespo and Ferreira 2011). Yet they have acknowledged the complication in applying choice egalitarianism that arises given that choices are affected by circumstances. To illustrate this complication, consider the following evidence from economic research on school dropout behavior. Recent work on the economics of dropping out of school measures the impact of school quality on dropout decisions (Hanushek and Harbison 1992; Hanushek, Lavy, and Hitomi 2007). This work offers empirical support for the plausible presumption that students care about school quality and take it into account in rationally motivated decisions about school attendance. Quality-related considerations include things like quality of teaching, curriculum, textbook, technology, and school facilities as well as class sizes, parental involvement, and school funding. The critical empirical finding is that high-quality schools serve to retain students and to prevent dropouts. So independent of individual student ability or achievement, better schools directly increase the probability that any given student will stay in school. So according to this empirical research on the economics of dropping out, both high- and low-achieving students recognize school quality differences and rationally act on them in decisions about whether to drop out or stay in school.
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It is plausible to presume that school quality considerations also impact decisions about performance and achievement, and maybe even to a larger extent since dropping out in the face of poor quality may not even be practically possible for those disadvantaged students that lack mobility or access to higher quality schools. So, for example, in poorer quality schools students will either drop out or, where this is not feasible, they will underachieve. By the same token, it is also plausible that the drop out behavior and achievement of black students in particular are also tied to the perception of teacher bias in grading, or more generally to teachers’ perceptions, expectations, and behaviors regarding racial group differences. Indeed this is not simply a matter of conjecture: it is a claim for which there is some empirical support. Black student perceptions of teacher bias or expectations has been found to sustain and quite possibly to expand the racial achievement gap by contributing to black student underinvestment in skills and underachievement (Ferguson 1998). This evidence on the economics of dropping out and on black student perceptions of teacher bias might be applied to explain the problem of black underachievement in at least two ways: (1) black students expend less academic effort in school in anticipation of future discrimination in the labor market where they will not get a full return on their investment in skills; (2) black students who do not drop out due to poor school quality expend less academic effort in school in anticipation of teacher bias in school where they will not get a full return on their investment in skills (in terms of grades, school recognition and honors, for examples). In either case the decision to under invest in academic skills and thereby underachieve, which sustains or expands the racial achievement gap, would seem to be a rational response to black perceptions and expectations—justified or not—about their larger social environment and their relationship to it. A broader lesson can be extracted from the foregoing evidence: circumstances or social context can be subtle and can undermine performance even in highly motivated minorities. Additional evidence from psychology supports this point. Stereotype or social identity threat occurs when people believe or fear they might be judged in light of a negative stereotype about their group (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson 2002). For example, simply telling women before they take a math test that men do better on math than women or having African Americans indicate their race before taking a difficult verbal test is sufficient to evoke stereotype threat and hurt their performance in these stereotype-relevant domains. Such decrements in performance occur only with respect to stereotype-relevant dimensions (e.g., women on math tests; African Americans on tests of verbal ability); subtle reminders of one’s disadvantaged group membership do not harm all types of task performances. Some research suggests that anxiety is evoked in women and African Americans when their group membership is suggestive of poor performance in a particular domain and, as a result, actual performance on relevant tests is disrupted. Such under-performance has been observed among very capable minority group members who are highly motivated to do well and value the task domain. Such effects
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are difficult to control and can be induced easily by simply requiring people to indicate their group membership before taking a test in a domain in which they are vulnerable. This social psychological evidence offers a rather different explanation for the racial achievement gap from the economic ones predicating either conscious withdrawal of effort or dropping out of school. And according to this psychological evidence the underachievement of African Americans and women is a situation-based expectancy effect that is hard to control, although there are ways by which the situation can be made “safer” for minorities and women so that such under performance does not occur. The general conclusion we draw from the economics and psychology evidence is this: even if choice egalitarians insist upon focusing narrowly on individual choices, evidence of the impact of circumstances on individual choices cannot be discounted. One way for choice egalitarians to respond to the objection that the choice-circumstance distinction is analytically oversimplified is by claiming that if choices are actually constrained by circumstances, in the way that the foregoing empirical evidence suggests, then we are simply on the circumstance side of the divide and such educational and other inequalities are a proper object of egalitarian concern in any event. Furthermore, they might take the further step of claiming, as Cohen does, that most existing inequalities are actually due to circumstances and not choices—a point that holds whether we take there to be a direct connection between circumstances and unequal distributions or an indirect one mediated by constrained choices. Even if one is inclined to follow Cohen (and we certainly are) in believing that many existing social inequalities stem from circumstances not attributable to those on the short side of them, under nonideal conditions this will be problematic because it effectively takes choice off the table as a competing explanation for inequality. And the further step of claiming that inequalities actually stem from (or are caused by) circumstances is also problematic for the same reason. Both strategies require that we make a determination about the causes of inequality in ascertaining when distributive inequalities are unjust. But this poses a serious problem if we need an egalitarian conception of justice well suited for nonideal conditions in which people—say liberals and conservatives or blue state and red state citizens and the rich and poor—have deep disagreement about the causes of inequality, where this disagreement varies across social groups, and where the amount of evidence required to judge an inequality as unjust is motivated by social identity considerations. Given that some people will clearly put more emphasis on the choices rather than the circumstances under these conditions (e.g., whites put more emphasis on choice rather than circumstance when explaining the cause of black-white inequality), and that this is consequential for how the idea of responsibility is incorporated into an egalitarian framework, to insist that we are entirely on the circumstance side of the divide, or that most
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existing inequalities stem from circumstances, will leave us in a hopeless stand off. This problem is compounded when we consider the evidence of how differential injustice standards account for group differences in appraisals of social inequality.
III. DIFFERENTIAL INJUSTICE STANDARDS There are substantial group differences in the perceived severity of existing inequality, how much progress has been made toward its reduction, and the standards used to judge its unfairness or injustice. For example, women are more likely to judge the income gap between men and women as remaining unchanged or increasing, while men are more likely to judge it as decreasing across time (Sniderman et al. 1999). Likewise, women are more likely to cite pervasive and severe forms of discrimination as affecting their life outcomes and disadvantaging members of their group as a whole than are men (Branscombe 1998; Schmitt, Branscombe, Kobrynowicz, and Owen 2002). Similar perception and experience of inequality gaps in the United States have been consistently found based on racial group membership. Few black Americans (38 percent) perceive the racial wage gap as having decreased over the past ten years, but a majority of white Americans (72 percent) believe the gap has declined (Sigelman and Welch 1991; Sniderman et al. 1999). Ironically, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 magnified this effect. Pre- to postelection of President Obama, whites came to believe more progress toward equality has been achieved and that therefore there is less need for further progress toward equality and less support was given to social policies aimed at increasing racial equality (Kaiser et al. 2009). Consistent with the findings based on gender, racial minorities also perceive discrimination as considerably more likely to affect their everyday outcomes including housing, schooling, and employment than are whites (Adams, Tormala, and O’Brien 2006; Branscombe, Schmitt, and Harvey 1999; Sigelman and Welch 1991). Indeed, what practices are even deemed to constitute racism differs for black and white Americans (Lowery, Knowles, and Unzueta 2007; Nelson et al. 2010). Why do such gender and racial gaps in perceived inequality and progress toward equality exist? There are several important social psychological factors that are critical for understanding why inequality is differentially perceived depending on group membership. First of all, advantaged and disadvantaged group members employ different comparison points in evaluating reality. Because equality is a more central goal for those who are disadvantaged relative to the advantaged, women and ethnic minorities are more likely to judge existing circumstances with reference to the ideal or end point of full equality. And they might understand this in terms of being treated as an equal or associate it with diminishing inequality gaps. In contrast, advantaged groups are more likely to judge the present with reference to the past when discrimination and segregation were both legal and normative. They
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might judge existing circumstances by whether they are free from overt or formal discrimination. Use of such spontaneously differing comparison points does affect judgments of the extent to which progress has been made; when such differing comparison points are eliminated by instructing respondents to use the same reference point (past or future), then racial differences in perceptions of progress are minimized (Eibach and Ehrlinger 2006). Not only do the advantaged and disadvantaged differ in the comparison point used in judging reality, but also they differ in their actual beliefs about what reality exists. As Pettigrew (2008) documents, white Americans believe that racial discrimination has been largely eliminated, while black Americans see present-day discrimination as the primary reason for racial inequality. In the critical domain of education, the divide over what reality exists is particularly clear. Although white Americans widely support school integration and believe it exists today, that is far from the case. As Pettigrew (2004) documented, the nation’s public schools are now actually more racially segregated than they have been since the 1960s. And desegregated public schooling matters a great deal for the nature of the “choices” available to and subsequently selected by black Americans; those from desegregated schools are more likely to attend college, obtain better jobs, attain high incomes, and have more positive contact with whites. Experience in desegregated environments not only provides blacks with access to white social networks that enables opportunities, but reduces the anxiety associated with interracial interaction which is essential for successful social mobility (Pettigrew 2008). It is also the case that the very meaning of “equality” and the emotional connotations of it can differ for members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. For whites, greater equality may be perceived from the vantage point of a potential “loss” for their group—compared to their historically privileged position—so may be experienced as relatively negative. For the advantaged what matters is formal equality or equal treatment before the law where this is often associated with putting an end to discrimination. Substantive equality and achieving equal social relations will be a lower priority or will be deemed insignificant. In contrast, blacks are likely to perceive greater equality as a potential “gain” for their group, given their historically disadvantaged position, with greater equality being experienced as a positive. Using prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1984), a prominent perspective in economics, which argues that people are risk averse such that losses loom more heavily in judgment than equivalent gains, we can illustrate how equality takes on different emotional meanings for those who are differentially positioned in the social structure. Evidence consistent with the foregoing has been obtained from a number of streams of research. Eibach and Keegan (2006) found that when social changes in university admissions were framed as “Whites’ losses,” then white Americans perceived progress toward equality as more negative and substantial than black Americans. In contrast, when the same admissions changes were framed as “Minorities’ gains,” then whites responded less negatively and perceived lower and
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equivalent progress toward equality as black Americans. Consistent with this, when white Americans’ race-based privileges are questioned and seen as likely to be lost in the future, more negative responses to racial equality emerge, particularly among those who are highly identified with their racial group (Branscombe, Schmitt, and Schiffhauer 2007). Another important reason why advantaged and disadvantaged groups perceive and respond differentially to inequality is that they use different criteria for deciding on the deservingness of outcomes. Advantaged groups often exaggerate their group’s effort and worth, while minimizing the effort and deservingness of the disadvantaged group (Branscombe and Miron 2004; Walster, Berscheid, and Walster 1973). Indeed, advantaged and disadvantaged groups can shift the standards of injustice they use when confronted with existing inequality, and doing so helps to maintain their positive group identity. By strategically employing a high standard of injustice, advantaged group members can judge existing inequality as less severe and therefore less in need of correction. Consider how this standard shifting process can work (see Miron, Warner, and Branscombe 2011). First, men and women are given factual information about the extent of the gender wage gap (i.e., that women earn 74.3 cents for every dollar earned by equally qualified men, which translates into women earning $523,000 less than men over a lifetime). Then, how much evidence is needed to conclude that the wage gap is unfair to women is assessed, followed by respondents desire to reduce gender-based inequality. Men report requiring more evidence of inequality than women to conclude that the existing gender wage gap is unfair. Specifically, men reported that 40 percent of women would need to have salaries that are lower than those of men for them to call the existing gender wage inequality unfair, whereas women set the threshold at only 20 percent of women needing to have lower salaries to arrive at the same unfairness conclusion. By setting a more severe standard for judging inequality, men were able to conclude that the inequality that exists is less unfair. Similar standard setting differences have been observed among members of different racial groups. White participants set higher standards for concluding that the racial wage gap is unjust than do black participants, which allows whites to evaluate existing racial inequality as less severe and perceive less need to decrease the inequality than do blacks. And, we know that this group-based standard shifting process is a strategic one that serves to protect the advantaged group’s identity (Miron, Branscombe, and Biernat 2010). We know this is the case because the use of higher standards of injustice (i.e., requiring more evidence to confirm inequality is unjust) increases as advantaged group members increasingly identify with their group and are therefore motivated to protect its identity. For instance, as identification as a white American increases, the economic damage that needs to have been done as a result of the practice of slavery increases (e.g., $1 billion in damages rather than only $1 million), and as a result of this standard shifting American actions are less likely to be seen as racist or constitute injustice. Precisely by setting
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a higher standard, the actual harm committed by the ingroup can be seen as not so severe and less unjust. How people perceive the causes of inequality and whether it is seen as just or unjust depends powerfully on group membership. Groups that are differentially placed in the social structure experience different circumstances (are exposed to discrimination or not) and are differentially motivated to define and perceive those circumstances as just or unjust. Those who are disadvantaged know that discrimination affects their choices and outcomes; in effect choice and circumstances are inextricably bound together for them. In contrast, advantaged groups do not experience exclusion and discrimination as typically defined, but they do at times experience privilege—benefits based on their group membership. Ironically enough, privileged group members are quite motivated to not perceive their own circumstances as a determinant of the choices and options available to them. Doing so would undermine their perceived responsibility for those favorable outcomes (Branscombe 1998). We conclude that disadvantaged groups are more inclined to adopt a standard of injustice or inequality, e.g., viewing their choices as constrained by circumstances, because this a less stringent standard and puts advantaged groups on the hook for inequality. On the contrary, advantaged groups will be more inclined to posit a separation between choices and circumstances, and to view choices as freestanding determinants of inequality, because this is a more stringent standard of injustice. We now expand on this empirical evidence to argue that backward-looking theories of egalitarian justice, of which choice egalitarianism is an instance, are not well suited for encouraging people to take collective responsibility for doing something about inequality in nonideal conditions because of these differing beliefs about inequality and differential injustice standards.
IV. EGALITARIANISM AND RESPONSIBILITY Choice egalitarianism takes choice to be an excusing condition. This means that presumptively unjust unequal distributions will be considered just if they are caused by choices rather than circumstances. Because it connects determinations of justice to how outcomes are causally brought about this conception of egalitarian justice can be characterized as backward looking. Taking a stand on the causal issue is consequential because it invites attributions of blameworthy responsibility for inequality and injustice. But such attributions will be problematic under the nonideal conditions that we have been considering. And the proper response to this is not to eschew such attributions but rather to disconnect them from our theoretical determinations of justice. In other words, under nonideal circumstances, in which people not only disagree about the causes of inequality but have motivated reasons to adopt different standards for appraising the fairness of inequality, we
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should avoid making causal attributions of blameworthy responsibility a basis for collective responsibility for sharing the burden of addressing objectionable inequalities. Our argument concludes by distinguishing between two senses of responsibility, commenting on how they are sometimes linked, and then discussing the relevance of this link in assessing backward-looking theories of egalitarian justice of which choice egalitarianism is but one instance. One way to gloss the difference between circumstances and choices—the contrast which grounds choice egalitarianism—is to describe the former as that for which individuals cannot be held responsible and the latter as that for which they can be. So when evaluating whether or not redistribution is warranted to diminish social inequalities, from this perspective, we must be guided by a sense of how to allocate responsibility. And the choice/circumstance distinction purports to offer a clear-cut way to determine which parties should bear the lion’s share of responsibility in mitigating objectionable inequality. Cohen (2011) takes it to be a virtue of choice egalitarianism that it is sensitive to the objection that egalitarians wish to insist upon redistribution even in cases where optional choices seem to lead to social inequality (120–21). Incorporating matters of choice and responsibility within an egalitarian framework has been the preferred way of demonstrating the appropriate sensitivity. With respect to the matter of responsibility, Scanlon (1998) offers an illuminating distinction between responsibility as attributability and substantive responsibility. A person is attributively responsible in the former sense when an action can be attributed to them in the manner required for moral blame or praise. A backward-looking search for causes is a familiar way to establish this kind of responsibility. Someone is responsible in the latter sense when they are obliged to take action on behalf of other persons even though they may not be blameworthy. But we need not take a stance on the causes of outcomes to establish responsibility in this sense, which will be a positive thing for our argument. These two senses are distinct in that one can be held responsible in the former sense but not be held responsible in the latter sense and vice versa. So, for example, Jane can be deemed morally blameworthy for having less income than Jim for choosing to take on a lower-paying job such as stay-at-home childcare. But we may hold that others bear some responsibility for subsidizing goods and services that Jane needs to support herself and her child perhaps because Jane and Jim live within a society where markets do not afford equal pay for equal work. This makes sense if rather than accept less pay for the same work Jane decided to accept less pay for the more fulfilling job of caring for her children along with other children. Some philosophers have used this distinction between the two kinds of responsibility to sharpen the contrast between choice egalitarians and some of their critics. For instance, Blake and Risse (2008) have argued that choice egalitarians tie judgments of substantive responsibility to judgments of responsibility as attributability and flesh out the latter in terms of voluntary choice. Thus, the point is that choice egalitarians make their normative claims about what we are obligated to do
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for ourselves and for one another (i.e., claims about who is responsible for bearing the burden of mitigating inequality) by considering whether our choices or conduct can be deemed morally blameworthy or otherwise validly subject to moral criticism. In contrast, some of their critics, particularly ones that Cohen describes as “fraternity egalitarians” entirely disconnect judgments of substantive responsibility from responsibility as attributability. So here the point is that we cannot arrive at normative conclusions about what we owe those on the short side of social inequalities without first determining how much and to what extent their predicament is the result of morally blameworthy choices or conduct. We agree with the importance of not grounding substantive responsibility in responsibility as attributability, particularly under nonideal conditions of the sort we have considered. But we think that choice egalitarianism, as a backward-looking conception of egalitarian justice, is guilty of this—though it is hardly the only culprit. Some versions of fraternity egalitarianism might also be characterized as backward looking and thus will have the same shortcoming. Cohen describes fraternity egalitarians as those who take the point of equality to be instantiating certain kinds of social relationships that enable persons to stand as, and view one another as, equals. Choice egalitarians and fraternity egalitarians present us with different visions of the proper object of egalitarian concern. The former embrace a vision that treats egalitarianism as a distributive ideal seeking to mitigate the effects of unchosen circumstances on distributive outcomes, while the latter treat it as a relational ideal seeking to establish the conditions for persons to view one another as equals notwithstanding unequal distributive outcomes. Anderson (1999), the most famous philosophical champion of this brand of egalitarianism, encourages us to attend to egalitarian social movements to appreciate the nature and basis of this powerful egalitarian perspective, which contains both a critical and a constructive dimension. Critically, fraternal egalitarians call for undoing social relationships in which “some people dominate, exploit, marginalize, demean and inflict violence upon others.” And they maintain that inequality is unjust when it reflects, embodies, or causes inequality of status rooted in objectionable relationships. Constructively, they call for the establishment of a society where persons stand together as equals living in a democratic rather than a hierarchical society. Suffice it to say that both conceptions of egalitarianism are unsuitable in that neither view respects the distinction between Scanlon’s two senses of responsibility. Both views can be described as “backward looking” insofar as they require us to take a stand on the causes of inequality to assess whether or not a purported inequality is unjust. The former relies upon an analytical distinction between choices and circumstances to distinguish just from unjust inequality. And the latter characterizes inequality as unjust when oppressive or hierarchical social relations cause it. An egalitarian theory of justice that grounds the demands of justice without requiring us to take a stand on the causes of inequality would be more attractive under the nonideal circumstances.
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We take neutrality about the causes of inequality to be an important desideratum of a suitable egalitarian conception of when inequality is unfair under nonideal circumstances in which people not only disagree about the causes of inequality but have motivated reasons to adopt different perspectives on the causes of inequality and on the standards by which they are judged. Of course we do not mean to rule out the claim that inequality has a cause. Nor do we deny that some people will take facts about the causes of inequality as a basis for determining moral responsibility in an attributive sense. Under ideal circumstances, where everyone involved can agree about the causes of inequality, the inference to taking responsibility for addressing inequality can follow trouble free, even though there may be disagreement over how best to discharge this responsibility. However, matters are different under nonideal circumstances—when everyone does not agree about the cause, or when their social identities send them in different directions; the inference will be highly contentious. The pursuit of egalitarian justice certainly requires that we pay attention to the negative effects of inequality and their purported harms, which are both economic and noneconomic in nature. But pursuing justice is a complex matter because persons will bring different standards to bear in judging the amount and nature of evidence needed to convince them that particular inequalities are unjust or unfair. And we must not underestimate the significance of disagreement and divisions regarding the causes of inequality and the differential standards of injustice. These are significant obstacles to the pursuit of social justice for pragmatic reasons having to do with constructive discourse (Bobo 2001, 284) but also for fostering a commitment to taking substantive responsibility for unequal outcomes. This will be all but impossible if a commitment to egalitarian justice requires a commitment to the causes of inequality and thereby builds causal responsibility into the fabric of the theory.
V. CONCLUSION In this article we have drawn upon social psychological evidence concerning group differences in appraisals of inequality to argue that choice egalitarianism is unsuitable for articulating the demands of justice in nonideal conditions. Taking choice egalitarianism to be an instance of a backward-looking conception of egalitarian justice insofar as it requires us to take a stand on the causes of inequality, we utilized Scanlon’s distinction between two senses of responsibility to argue that this conception is an unsuitable way of articulating the demands of egalitarian justice in nonideal conditions where people not only disagree about the causes of inequality but have motivated reasons to adopt different standards for appraising the fairness of inequality. This shortcoming is especially serious when we are interested in getting people to assume collective responsibility for doing something about inequality in the real world.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to participants at the Rethinking Inequality: Philosophical Reflections on Recent Empirical Research workshop held at the University of Ottawa where an earlier draft of this paper was presented. We are especially grateful to Monique Deveaux and Patti Lenard, the workshop convenors, for their insightful comments on the workshop version of our paper. Development of the argument in section IV, on egalitarianism and responsibility, benefited from a very helpful conversation with Peter Railton on egalitarianism and the causes of inequality. Work on this collaborative project was completed during the Winter 2013 term while Darby was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is grateful for the research travel support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts during this period. Nyla Branscombe was supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program during the writing of this article.
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