Luck and Desert: John Rawls

Mindful of these beckoning figures, I want nonetheless to begin my argument about luck with a contemporary text, one all the more instructive for being so unlikely. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), perhaps the most celebrated text in twentieth-century political philosophy, and the work of a self-acknowledged Kantian, is very much dedicated to the idea of noncontingent reason, understood as a principle of "absolute necessity," absolute enough to be the "ground of obligation" and "cleansed of everything that can only be empirical and appropriate to anthropology," as Kant had counseled in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).^[15] Justice, for Rawls as for Kant, is incompatible with circumstantial vagaries; but for both it is also imaginable outside of those vagaries. It is imaginable, that is, as a hypothetical construct, as the endpoint to an idealized exercise of reason, the endpoint to a deliberative process freed from all compromising particulars.

To his great credit, however, enamored as he is of noncontingent reason, Rawls never tries to naturalize it, never imagines it as effortlessly at home in the world, in the state of nature. Indeed, his "state of nature," the starting point for his political theory, is notable for being harshly arbitrary. For it is here, at the outset, that we are faced with the most glaring instance of distributive in justice: the random inequality of natural endowments. At the heart of Rawls's theory of justice, then, is something like a constitutive theory of luck. It is the sense that luck has always been there, from the very beginning—the sense that we are its creature, its handiwork—that pushes him to

some of his most radical conclusions, especially his argument about desert and its relation to distributive entitlement.

Desert is, of course, seen by most sensible laymen (and mainstream political philosophers) as the basis of our entitlement and therefore as the moral foundation for distributive justice.^[16] Rawls disagrees. He rejects the idea that "distributive shares should be in accordance with moral worth," that reward should match a corresponding merit.^[17] For him, such an idea is not only undemocratic in practice but unpersuasive in theory. He argues, instead, that what counts as our "merit" is actually something that accrues to us through the accident of birth, through "luck in the natural lottery."^[18] We cannot be said to deserve it, any more than we can be said to deserve those material advantages that accrue to us through the same accident. In short, to allow "the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents" is to do no more than to submit to "the outcome of the natural lottery, and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective."^[19]

Rawls's vigorous rejection of desert is therefore the starting point for an alternative theory of justice. It is also the starting point for an alternative theory of the person. Since we do not actually deserve those attributes that happen to be lodged in us, we also cannot be said to own them. For Rawls, this thought gives rise to an exhilarating (and some would say phantasmagoric) vision of the world: here, natural talents are imagined to be showered upon the earth, like manna from heaven (the phrase is Robert Nozick's),^[20] unowned, unmarked, undeserved by any particular person, and free to be used for the good of all. This notion of common usability—applied to attributes long considered private and personal—makes for a distributive domain larger than anything previously imagined. Out of this radically enlarged pool of resources, Rawls is able to argue for an equally radical mode of distribution, based not on the moral reflexivity within particular persons, not on the supposed correlation between merit and reward, but on the political will of the community, on its concerted policy decision. In other words, the benefit each person receives would not be self-evident or self-executing, would not reflect the sort of person he or she happens to be or the sort of work he or she happens to have done. It would express instead the principles of fairness of the entire society, the distributive choices that it makes regarding the individual and collective well-being of its members.

Such principles would speak not only to those lucky enough to be naturally talented but also to those so unlucky as to be without rewardable talents.

Critics of Rawls have, of course, objected to his theory of justice as an elegant but thinly disguised scheme for the redistribution of wealth, a scheme that, in refusing to reward excellence in particular persons, must end up destroying the ethical (not to say the economic) primacy of the person. This objection, forceful as it is, also seems to me somewhat beside the point. Rawls himself, indeed, is reassuringly emphatic here. "Each person," he announces on the first page of A Theory of Justice , "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override."^[21] What is especially fascinating here, then, both in the context of thinking about luck and in the more general context of thinking about the political consequences of personhood, is the way Rawls has managed to jettison the notion of personal desert without jettisoning, at the same time, either the category of the "person" or its political centrality within a theory of democratic justice. The challenge for him is thus to defend a distributive justice based on policy decision rather than on private endeavor and to demonstrate (appearances to the contrary) that this rejection of individual desert is nonetheless not a violation of individual rights, not incompatible with a respect for persons.

Differently put, we might say that Rawls's challenge is to adjudicate between—to devise a rational court of appeal for—Two conflicting sets of claims: between the communitarian claims of the welfare state on the one hand and the individualistic claims of the liberal subject on the other. His strategy is to effect a formal solution to the problem, which is to say, a solution by virtue of an idealized noncontingent procedure. His celebrated construct, the "veil of ignorance"—a hypothetical situation in which the deliberating parties, knowing nothing about their yet-to-be-assigned fortunes, are asked to work out a principle of justice fair to all concerned, fair especially to those least advantaged—is one such solution. The virtue of such a construct is that it would allow reason to work with optimal freedom, which for Rawls also means that it would allow justice to emerge as a matter of procedure, because under these idealized conditions, justice would simply be the endpoint of our deliberative rationality. It would be "the choice which rational men would make."^[22] Central to Rawls's theory of justice, then, is a mechanism to purify contingent

man into rational man, a mechanism to extract the deliberating subject from all those circumstantial prejudices, all those accidental attributes, which hamper his exercise of reason.

As befits a Kantian, Rawls's is a strictly categorical conception of the person.^[23] This is true not only of those hypothetical figures behind the veil of ignorance but also of his political subject, which to be a democratic subject must also be theorized into a suitable state of noncontingency. Indeed, any tangible or rewardable attributes, any marks of excellence or lack of excellence—all these particularizing features of the self—must be relegated to a domain defined both as prior to democracy and, in the end, as amendable by it. For Rawls, such redefinitions are crucial if the "person" is to remain democratically defensible, for a democratic subject must be first and foremost a universal subject, one whose political dignity is absolute, about whom one can make a categorical claim. To arrive at such a subject, actual selves would have to be stripped bare, would have to be removed from all those accidental features, all those inequities of chance, which make them unfit for such a categorical description.^[24]

The upshot of this exercise is ultimately to bring about a refinement in the Rawlsian syntax of the self, a small but crucial distinction that he implicitly depends upon: namely, between what a person is and what a person has , between what is me and what is mine . It is a matter of luck that I am some particular person, that I have attributes I can call my own. But because those attributes that are "mine" are assigned to me by luck, because they just happen to have attached themselves to me, they cannot properly be said to be "me." Indeed, to give the paradox an even sharper edge, what is "mine" is, for that very reason, not "me." Rawls's theory of justice therefore operates on something like a postulate of detachability. It both assumes and requires a categorical subject apprehensible apart from all its substantive descriptions. Only such a "me," conceived in contradistinction to what is "mine," can make justice more than an apology for the accident of birth. Only such a "me" can make democratic equality not just a policy but also an epistemology.

This rigorous distinction between "me" and "mine" thus commits Rawls to what he himself acknowledges to be a "thin" theory of the person, one that bears, if not exactly an inverse relation, then at least a suspended relation to people as they ordinarily appear and as they are ordinarily perceived, people thick with particular traits, which

they innocently call "his" or "hers," "yours" or "mine." Such usages are unacceptable to Rawls, because the person, to be democratically defensible, must be defensible as a categorical idea rather than as people with actual features and attributes. This is, in a sense, the logical consequence of yet another (and perhaps analytically prior) paradox in Rawls: his simultaneous acknowledgement of and revulsion against luck, his sense not only of its abiding centrality in human life but also of its unconscionable tyranny. For if his rejection of desert is based on the insight that desert is merely luck in disguise, the ubiquity of luck is at the same time a grievous wrong for him, one that carries with it a silent directive, a demand for rectification. And so, as Rawls himself admits, his theory of justice is very much a theory to combat luck, a theory to "nullif[y] the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance."^[25] His cleansing of the political subject is an effort in that direction, an effort to free the self of the incrustations of luck, to save the essential "me" from the accidental "mine," so that the category of the person can finally be categoric, and justice can finally be noncontingent.