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Philosophy & Public Affairs 31.4 (2003) 321-355



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Basic Structure and the Value of Equality

A. J. Julius


I

Evaluation from the point of view of justice is at once encompassing and austere. Judgments of justice and injustice take in whole societies. But to conclude that a society is just or unjust, I don't have to know what everyone in the society is doing. It's enough that I know how the society's institutions are arranged, or that I understand the basic framework that shapes its members' interaction over time or the basic mechanisms that distribute them over a range of prospects for living better and worse lives.

It is possible to account for the structural bent and the institutional focus of our reasoning about justice without attributing much moral depth to these inclinations. Suppose that justice requires that people hold goods in some pattern. Before we can achieve that pattern we need to get a grip on the whole web of relations among people's actions and holdings. But that web is very big, and we are forced to narrow in on a mere handful of the most important relations. Moreover it is only by submitting our largely decentralized and myopic exchanges to a battery of centrally promulgated rules that we can hope to find traction on the pattern of holdings. We risk upending the pattern we prefer if we separately aim for it from our different corners of the society. The institutional cast of our distributive judgments and our accent on the justice of basic frameworks are well-advised, then, but their warrant is derivative. They have no moral basis deeper than an awareness of garden-variety limits to social coordination.

John Rawls is widely understood to have claimed a more foundational significance for the selective attention of reasoning about justice when [End Page 321] he wrote that "the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of a society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation." 1 The Rawlsian motif of basic structure has an uncertain place in the ongoing discussion of his ideas. His own arguments for the primacy of basic structure are brisk by comparison to his development of many other themes, and the most systematic recent comments on this view lean more to burial than to praise. 2 In this article, though I will not interpret or defend Rawls's position, I will argue that something like his basic structure enjoys an intrinsic claim to special moral attention. 3 As a name for that subject I borrow his magnificently drab phrase.

II

I will argue that a basic structure is the subject of specifically egalitarian principles of distributive justice. That argument begins in Section IV. I first put down some stakes and context for it by sketching two problems on which it might bear. The current section raises one such issue about the value of equality, and in Section III I recall some difficulties turned up by previous discussions of the basic-structural subject.

Many of us think that social life is unjust if it sustains too much inequality in the material conditions of people's lives. Like Rawls and thanks in part to his instruction, some of us understand this egalitarian commitment as a piece of deontology. For example some of us think that if people do not work to cancel or to counteract the rejected inequalities, then by virtue of that failure they are interacting on terms that they cannot all justify to one another, and that their reason to aim for equality rides their obligation to interact on interpersonally justifiable terms. [End Page 322]

Egalitarian deontology is a complex idea perenially beset by more plain-thinking rivals. On one side many philosophical partisans of broadly redistributive politics insist that these politics are innocent of deontological roots. They think that equality is just better than inequality or that gains for poorer people just have extra weight in the scale of the general welfare...

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