Critical Notice

The 2008 meltdown in global capital markets has led to a renewed interest in questions of economic distribution. Many people suggest that the motives, incentive structures, and institutions in place were inadequate and, for the first time in a generation, public debate is animated by arguments about the need for greater equality. G.A. Cohen's new book resonates with many of the themes of these debates; he advocates a more thoroughgoing equality, even more thoroughgoing than that demanded by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice; he also advocates for a political philosophy organized around the ethos that shapes ordinary life, rather than one restricted to the coercive institutions of law and the state. Were ordinary citizens to live by the principles Cohen urges, it is unlikely that there ever would have been a housing bubble, because people would not have organized their productive activities around the pursuit of profits. Moreover, Cohen's vision of an egalitarian society is animated by a thought that must have occurred to many observers of the economic downturn. When the credit bubble burst, billions of dollars in wealth disappeared, but none of the material objects that the wealth consisted in changed in any way. The houses and cars were still there; why were they now owned by banks, which had no interest in occupying them, and nobody to sell them to? It might be thought that a more humane system would allow all of the same things to be produced, but decouple questions about production and distribution from questions about material incentives. Cohen concedes that the hard facts of economics and human psychology might make such an alternative system unworkable,¹ but argues that those facts cannot serve to make current capitalist arrangements just. Developing this line of thought, Cohen argues that the same objection applies to Rawls's program in political philosophy. Rawlsian justice demands far more equality than any capitalist democracy has instituted, but, Cohen contends, nonetheless represents a similar compromise of justice in light of unfortunate circumstances.

Although Cohen's book resonates with contemporary concerns in one way, it is removed from them in another. Even by the standards of a philosophy book, Cohen's addresses the issues at an extremely abstract level. This ascent into abstraction is based on the book's ambition. Cohen's animating thought is that the Rawlsian approach to political philosophy is concerned with the wrong questions. He charges that it goes wrong in focusing exclusively on social institutions rather than individual actions as the site of justice, in supposing that rules are the appropriate objects of assessment for a theory of justice, and in contending that principles are sensitive to facts. For Cohen, justice is not, in the first instance, a property of social institutions and their rules. They should seek justice, but must inevitably do so in light of factors other than justice. A single-minded pursuit of justice, while sacrificing other values, or paying no attention to the circumstances in which people find themselves would be, as he puts it, 'crazy.' But the recognition, however regrettable, that justice must sometimes be compromised or limited must not be confused with the claim that justice itself demands those limits and compromises. Cohen thus rejects Rawls's famous claim that 'justice is the first virtue of social institutions,' in favor of the conclusion that it is one virtue among several. So Cohen's conception of justice is both more demanding than Rawls's but also less paramount.

Cohen's book is divided into two parts. The first, 'Rescuing Equality,' is a sustained critique of Rawls's views about distributive justice. In A Theory of Justice and his later works, Rawls argued in favor of what he called the 'Difference Principle' according to which shares in what he calls 'primary goods' such as income and wealth are to be equal except in those cases in which permitting unequal shares would increase the absolute size of shares of those receiving less than others. Cohen rejects the difference principle as a compromise...