Distributive Justice: Rawls' Theory and its Implications on Management

Shlinds, Yahoo! Contributor Network Sep 14, 2007 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

More: Unfairness Employee Recognition Employee Turnover Motivating Employees

tweet Print

FlagPost a comment Distributive justice, a theory based on writings of John Rawls, has a major focus of distributing assets fairly among a dynamic and diverse group of members from a community. This can be easily associated with the distribution of assets among employees within a company from a management point of view. Rawls felt that everything must be done in an act of achieving fairness throughout. He also did not want anything to be done that may hurt or damage another person. For example, Rawls felt that throughout a society, every demographic should be allowed the same treatment and goods as any other. The poor should receive the same health care as the rich, etc. (Lamont, 2002). Throughout management there is a constant task of making things seem as fair as possible for subordinates and fellow employees. Employees and subordinates always seem to find a way to bait one another off of each other. In essence they constantly question why one employee has better benefits, pay, or even treatment than them. Part of the time the employee may not be 100% sure that this actually does occur but rather a "feeling" of unfairness throughout their workplace. Management's job seems to be not only run the business as so but to also smother fires of jealousy or suspected unfair treatment between subordinates/employees. There are many problems with taking a distributive justice approach to managing employees/subordinates. To start with there is what Rawls discusses as the "Veil of Ignorance." The veil of ignorance basically expects all persons involved to act as though the do not know certain aspects about themselves and/or their lives (Anonymous). This veil assumes that all participants will continue through life as if they all are equal therefore contributing equally to society, in fear of being out of place (Anonymous). A veil of ignorance within a workplace is technically ignorant. To train, teach, award, reprimand all employees the same will never allow anyone to excel and/or reach a management position of

their own. The objective in a business is to train people to the best of their abilities while they are with your company. The hope is that they will assume management responsibilities, and climb the authority ladder within the company. Otherwise once the employee feels they received the desired skills then they leave and look for a better paying job with more authority at another business. With everyone being treated the same in every aspect and with all employees having the same mindset of not trying to out shine their fellow co-workers the office dynamics would be extremely intolerable. There would be no problem solvers, go-getters, motivators, etc. Rawls wrote that all authoritative positions within a company should allow any other employee to receive a chance for a new position within a company no matter what their background is (Cohen, 2002). This for management would be a major implication issue because if one person has the experience and the degrees to back up their knowledge and another person has none of the qualifications, they both should be given a chance to try the new position. This would relate back to Rawls views of fairness throughout. Another issue with using Rawls theory of distributive justice within a corporation is that not everyone deserves the same pay rate or vacation/personal time. New employees do not qualify for the same benefits as a person who has been with the company for ten years. Management would have trouble implicating new rules that would follow Rawls teachings, because the employees that have been with the company for an extended period of time would be the first ones to react at the unfairness that actually is occurring. Rawls overall objective of making everything fair throughout a company would not be ideal in an established company. However, the idea is not extremely far fetched for a new company that is just opening its doors to new employees. The employees for the new company would have no trouble enforcing the fair rules to all, no one would know any different. Therefore management would have an easier time for implementation at a new company rather than an established one. The main objective of Rawls vision, "In justice as fairness," Rawls says, "men agree to share one another's fate. In designing institutions they undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit" (Cohen, 2002) would have a hard time surviving in the corporate world. Management would have an extremely hard time implementing any of Rawls visions because employees are so dead set in the way they compete for more money, more benefits, more recognition, etc. Management's main objective is to empower their subordinates but by making them understand that they are in face subordinates and will have to strive to achieve a higher authoritative position. Businesses pay different employees on differing pay scales based on skill set, educational background, and length of time with a company. This helps to set people apart whether it is announced or assumed. This type of culture is needed with an organization because with everyone being treated the same in every aspect the company would be a breeding ground for lazy workers. The lazy workers would get the same recognition and benefits as another hardworking employee because the company follows the Rawls, distributive justice approach to business. Management would have a tough time with the implications of distributive justice within an organization because employees typically try to compete with each other to achieve higher pay, benefits, recognition, and positioning. It helps business constantly achieve greater results because someone is always pushing the envelope to do better. Fairness throughout a company no matter

an employee's background would cause extreme issues for management and would most likely cause more issues than results. As previously mentioned a new starter company would be the ideal place to use Rawls vision. Works Cited Cohen, Joshua. (2002). The Pursuit of Fairness in his theory of justice, John Rawls revitalized in liberal tradition. His arguments were abstract, but even thirty years later they still challenge Americans to live up to their best democratic ideals.: [Third Edition]. Boston Globe Cording, M., Donaldson, T., Werhane, P., (2002). Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lamont, Julian, (2002). Distributive Justice. University of Queensland.

A Theory of Justice
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

A Theory of Justice

Author(s) Country Language Subject(s) Genre(s) Publisher Publication date Media type Pages ISBN OCLC Number Dewey Decimal LC Classification

John Rawls United States English Political philosophy Nonfiction Belknap 1971 Print 560 0-674-00078-1 41266156 320/.01/1 21 JC578 .R38 1999

A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract. The resultant theory is known as "Justice as Fairness", from which Rawls derives his two principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.

Contents
[hide]

1 Objective 2 The original position 3 The First Principle of Justice 4 The Second Principle of Justice 5 Relationship to Rawls' later work 6 Criticism 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading

[edit] Objective
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality. Central to this effort is an account of the circumstances of justice, inspired by David Hume, and a fair choice situation for parties facing such circumstances, similar to some of Immanuel Kant's views. Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of the parties. These parties are recognized to face moderate scarcity, and they are neither naturally altruistic nor purely egoistic. They have ends which they seek to advance, but prefer to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms. Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation (the original position with its veil of ignorance) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice. Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favored principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and libertarian accounts.

[edit] The original position

Main article: Original position

Rawls belongs to the social contract tradition. However, Rawls' social contract takes a different view from that of previous thinkers. Specifically, Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an artificial device he calls the Original position in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This "veil" is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves that might cloud what their notion of justice is
"no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."

According to Rawls, ignorance of these details about oneself will lead to principles that are fair to all. If an individual does not know how he will end up in his own conceived society, he is

likely not going to privilege any one class of people, but rather develop a scheme of justice that treats all fairly. In particular, Rawls claims that those in the Original Position would all adopt a maximin strategy which would maximise the prospects of the least well-off.
They are the principles that rational and free persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamentals of the terms of their association [Rawls, p 11]

Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would adopt two such principles, which would then govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society. The difference principle permits inequalities in the distribution of goods only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. Rawls believes that this principle would be a rational choice for the representatives in the original position for the following reason: Each member of society has an equal claim on their societys goods. Natural attributes should not affect this claim, so the basic right of any individual, before further considerations are taken into account, must be to an equal share in material wealth. What, then, could justify unequal distribution? Rawls argues that inequality is acceptable only if it is to the advantage of those who are worst-off. The agreement that stems from the original position is both hypothetical and ahistorical. It is hypothetical in the sense that the principles to be derived are what the parties would, under certain legitimating conditions, agree to, not what they have agreed to. Rawls seeks to use an argument that the principles of justice are what would be agree upon if people were in the hypothetical situation of the original position and that those principles have moral weight as a result of that. It is ahistorical in the sense that it is not supposed that the agreement has ever been, or indeed could ever have been, derived in the real world outside of carefully limited experimental exercises.

[edit] The First Principle of Justice

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.[1]

The basic liberties of citizens are, the political liberty to vote and run for office, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest. However, he says: liberties not on the list, for example, the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g. means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire are not basic; and so they are not protected by the priority of the first principle.[2] The first principle may not be violated, even for the sake of the second principle, above an unspecified but low level of economic development. However, because various basic liberties may conflict, it may be necessary to trade them off against each other for the sake of obtaining

the largest possible system of rights. There is thus some uncertainty as to exactly what is mandated by the principle, and it is possible that a plurality of sets of liberties satisfy its requirements.

[edit] The Second Principle of Justice

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (Rawls, 1971, p.303; revised edition, p. 47): (a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). (b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

Rawls' claim in (a) is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods "things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants" [Rawls, 1971, pg. 92]are justified only to the extent that they improve the lot of those who are worst-off under that distribution in comparison with the previous, equal, distribution. His position is at least in some sense egalitarian, with a proviso that equality is not to be achieved by worsening the position of the least advantaged. An important consequence here, however, is that inequalities can actually be just on Rawls' view, as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off. His argument for this position rests heavily on the claim that morally arbitrary factors (for example, the family one is born into) shouldn't determine one's life chances or opportunities. Rawls is also keying on an intuition that a person does not morally deserve their inborn talents; thus that one is not entitled to all the benefits they could possibly receive from them; hence, at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated. The stipulation in (b) is lexically prior to that in (a). Fair equality of opportunity requires not merely that offices and positions are distributed on the basis of merit, but that all have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed. It may be thought that this stipulation, and even the first principle of justice, may require greater equality than the difference principle, because large social and economic inequalities, even when they are to the advantage of the worst-off, will tend seriously to undermine the value of the political liberties and any measures towards fair equality of opportunity.

[edit] Relationship to Rawls' later work

The original Theory of Justice, was an important but controversial and much criticized work of political philosophy. Although Rawls never retreated from the core argument of A Theory of Justice, he modified his theory substantially in subsequent works such as Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), in which he clarified and re-organised much of the argument of A Theory of Justice.

[edit] Criticism
In 1974, Rawls' colleague at Harvard, Robert Nozick, published a defense of libertarian justice, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.[3] Because it is, in part, a critique of A Theory of Justice, the two books are now often read together.[citation needed] Another Harvard colleague, Michael Walzer, wrote a defense of communitarian political philosophy, Spheres of Justice,[4] as a result of a seminar he co-taught with Nozick. In a related line of criticism, Michael Sandel, also a Harvard colleague, wrote Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,[5] which criticized A Theory of Justice for asking us to think about justice while divorced from the values and aspirations that define who we are as persons, and which allow us to determine what justice is. Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Critique and Reconstruction of A Theory of Justice,[6] which criticized Rawls from a Marxist perspective, immediately following the publication of A Theory of Justice. Wolff argues in this work that Rawls' theory is an apology for the status quo insofar as it constructs justice from existing practice and forecloses the possibility that there may be problems of injustice embedded in capitalist social relations, private property or the market economy. Feminist critics of Rawls, such as Susan Moller Okin,[7] largely focused on weakness of Rawls' in accounting for the injustices and hierarchies embedded in familial relations. Rawls argued that justice ought only to apply to the "basic structure of society." Feminists, rallying around the theme of "the personal is political," took Rawls to task for failing to account for injustices found in patriarchal social relations and the gendered division of labor, especially in the household. The assumptions of the original position, and in particular, the use of maximin reasoning, have also been criticized (most notably by Kenneth Arrow[8] and John Harsanyi),[9] with the implication either that Rawls designed the original position to derive the two principles, or that an original position more faithful to its initial purpose would not lead to his favored principles. In reply Rawls has emphasized the role of the original position as a "device of representation" for making sense of the idea of a fair choice situation for free and equal citizens.[10] Rawls has also emphasized the relatively modest role that maximin plays in his argument: it is "a useful heuristic rule of thumb" given the curious features of choice behind the veil of ignorance.[11] Some egalitarian critics have raised concerns over Rawls' emphasis on primary social goods. For instance, Amartya Sen has argued that we should attend not only to the distribution of primary goods, but also how effectively people are able to use those goods to pursue their ends.[12] In a related vein, Norman Daniels has wondered why healthcare shouldn't be treated as a primary good,[13] and some of his subsequent work has addressed this question, arguing for a right to health care within a broadly Rawlsian framework.[14] Philosopher Allan Bloom, a student of Leo Strauss, criticized Rawls for failing to account for the existence of natural right in his theory of justice, and wrote that Rawls absolutizes social union as the ultimate goal which would conventionalize everything into artifice.[15] Other criticisms of Rawls' theory have come from the philosopher G.A. Cohen. Cohen's series of influential papers culminated first in his book, If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So

Rich?[16] and then in his later work, Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cohen's criticisms are leveled against Rawls' avowal of inequality under the difference principle, against his application of the principle only to social institutions, and against Rawlsian obsession with the using primary goods as his currency of equality. Philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, a former student of Rawls', critiques and attempts to revitalize A Theory of Justice in his 2009 book The Idea of Justice. He defends the basic notion of justice as fairness but attacks the notion that the two principles of justice emerging from the Original position are necessary. Sen claims that there are multiple possible outcomes of the reflective equilibrium behind the veil of ignorance.