“Equality of What?”
and Intergenerational Justice
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Aarhus University, Denmark
ABSTRACT. Luck egalitarian accounts of distributive justice presuppose a metric in terms of which people’s relative positions are determined. This article
addresses the issue of the metric in an intergenerational setting focusing on
two problems: expensive tastes and the slavery of the talented. First, on the
assumption that later generations will have more expensive preferences than
earlier generations – with goods that were luxuries for past generations becoming necessities, the availability of which generates little satisfaction for later
generations – welfare egalitarianism recommends redistribution of resources
in favour of later generations. Indeed, welfare egalitarianism allows that one
generation cultivates cheap preferences among future generations thereby
allowing itself to deplete natural resources. I argue that neither of these implications defeats welfare egalitarianism as an account of intergenerational justice.
Second, suppose, plausibly, that work by one generation positively affects the
resources at the disposal of all later generations and assume that we apply
Dworkin’s idea of an auction of resources to an intergenerational setting. On
these assumptions, there is a sense in which, ceteris paribus, earlier generations
command more resources – to wit, more in terms of the internal resources
that valuable labour power constitutes – than later generations. Accordingly,
resource-egalitarianism implies that the first generation is required to be
maximally productive. This implication represents a particularly damaging
version of the so-called problem of the slavery of the talented, which has
exercised resource egalitarians in an intragenerational setting. Overall, this
paper indirectly supports welfare egalitarianism by deflecting possible
criticisms of it, and by resisting resourcist proposals as to how one should
accommodate the problem of the slavery of the first generation.
KEYWORDS. Dworkin, equality, expensive tastes, intergenerational justice, luck
egalitarianism, welfarism
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 19, no. 3(2012): 501-526.
© 2012 by Centre for Ethics, KU Leuven. All rights reserved.
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I. INTRODUCTION
P
atterned theories of distributive justice need, at some point, to incorporate an account of the currency, or metric, in terms of which
people’s positions are determined for the purpose of assessing the justice
of the relevant distribution. Luck egalitarians have responded to this basic
requirement with considerable care: Arneson’s equality of opportunity for
welfare (1989), Dworkin’s equality of resources (1981a; 1981b; 2000), and
Cohen’s equality of access to advantage (1989) testify to this. However,
their focus has been on intragenerational justice. On intergenerational justice – the just distribution of goods across generations – they have been
less vocal.1 Presumably this reflects the view that the shift from intragenerational to intergenerational raises no new issues. This view appears to
be correct in the sense that both types of justice do not oblige us to
introduce contrasting metrics: their metrics need not diverge.2 But this
does not mean that specific consideration of the intergenerational case is
unnecessary. For one thing, such consideration might highlight consequences of the metric obscured or absent in the more familiar intragenerational context, and this may lead to modification of the metric itself.
Second, an account of the metric of justice that is appropriately defended
in the intragenerational setting may turn out to have surprising implications in the intergenerational setting. We might, on reflection, judge that
we should accept these implications, even if they are at odds with our
initial convictions about intergenerational justice.
My goal here is explore two main problems the currency of justice is
known to raise. I want to see how these problems play out in an intergenerational setting, since I believe that this focus offers a new angle on
the metric of equality issue. The first main problem relates to expensive
tastes and is dealt with in Sections II and III. Several theorists addressing
the intragenerational issue have argued that an individual who is worse
off through having expensive preferences is not worse off in terms of
the relevant currency of egalitarian justice. Assuming later generations
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tend to have more expensive preferences than earlier generations – with
goods that were luxuries for past generations becoming necessities, the
availability of which generates little satisfaction for later generations –
welfarist egalitarianism would seem to recommend redistribution of
resources in favour of later generations. Some might take this as an objection to the view that welfare is the currency of justice (II). Moreover,
welfarist egalitarians seem to be comfortable with the notion that we
might cultivate cheap preferences among future generations, thereby
allowing the present generation to deplete natural resources, and some
regard this as a problem with welfarist egalitarianism (III). Like the first
objection, this also concerns expensive preferences, but here the focus is
on one party’s actively and deliberately cultivating cheap preferences in
another party.
The second main problem concerns the issue of the “slavery of the
talented” (Dworkin 1981b: 90), to which Dworkinians have paid much
attention in the more familiar intragenerational context. The idea is that
insofar as internal resources, e.g. productive talents, are included in the
measure of resources in terms of which people should be equal, one hour
of leisure for a talented person will count as a much greater consumption
of resources than one hour of leisure for an untalented person. Now suppose, plausibly, that work by one generation positively affects the
resources available for all later generations; and suppose that all members
of the first generation are untalented relative to the members of later
generations in the sense that had one of the later generations been the
first, the volume of resources conferred on later generations through the
efforts of the first generation would have been much greater than they in
fact are. On these assumptions, it seems that an intergenerational problem
of the ‘slavery of the first generation’ arises. I explain how this happens
and discuss various resourcist responses to the problem in sections IV to
VI. I argue that we make best sense of the problem from a welfarist perspective. Hence, while the article offers no direct defence of the view that
welfare is the currency of intergenerational justice, it offers indirect
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support for this view by deflecting possible criticisms thereof, and by
resisting resourcist proposals as to how one should accommodate the
problem of the slavery of the first generation.3
One preliminary point: I write about redistribution across generations
as if there were some way of taking resources from one generation, wherever it is located in time, and giving these to another generation, wherever
it happens to be located in time. Obviously, direct backward redistribution across generations is impossible, and this, among other factors,
means that the principles of regulation of intergenerational equality must
differ from the fundamental principles governing that equality. My concern in the present contribution is with the latter only. Accordingly, to
insist that redistribution in favour of past generations is impossible is
simply no objection to the views I advance. The said impossibility does
not prevent us from asking whether, if past generations had been as well
off as the present generation, the world would have been more just – the
sort of question we ask if we are concerned with fundamental principles
of justice, not principles of regulation (Cohen 2008, 5; 19-21).4 Also, even
though redistribution in favour of past generations is impossible, redistribution from present to future generations remains possible.
II. THE EXPENSIVE TASTES OF FUTURE GENERATIONS
One important challenge to a welfarist metric appeals to the idea of
expensive tastes (Page 2007, 455). In his defence of primary goods as the
currency of justice, John Rawls asks us to “Imagine two persons, one
satisfied with a diet of milk, bread and beans, while the other is distraught
without expensive wines and exotic dishes. In short one has expensive
tastes, the other does not” (1982, 168). If welfare is the relevant measure
of egalitarian justice, the second person merits more resources than the
first, since that (unlike equal shares) will ensure equality of welfare. However, Rawls denies that this is just: “As moral persons citizens have some
part in forming and cultivating their final ends and preferences. It is not
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by itself an objection to the use of primary goods that it does not accommodate those with expensive tastes” (1982, 168).5 The expensive tastes
problem seems pressing in the intergenerational setting, particularly if we
focus on what is now the developed world. Here, generations ago, most
people would have been satisfied with “milk, bread and beans”. But many
members of the present generation require at least occasional “expensive
wines and exotic dishes” to get to the same level of satisfaction, and who
knows what exorbitant tastes future generations will develop.6 More generally, by saying that members of one generation, G2, have more expensive preferences than members of another, G1, I mean that the former
would reach a lower level of satisfaction than that actually enjoyed by
members of G1 were they only to have the goods available to the latter,
whereas members of G1 would have a higher level of welfare than actually
enjoyed by members of G2 were they only to have the resources available
to G2.
Before I proceed, I should say a little more about expensive tastes.
Rawls’s example may mislead, or even give expensive tastes a bad name,
because it does not specify the grounds of the relevant satisfaction and
dissatisfaction. Suppose my dissatisfaction derives from an anti-egalitarian
preference to have greater satisfaction or consume more expensive goods
than others. This might be an objectionable preference from an egalitarian point of view, but it does not follow that I have expensive preferences.7 For a person to have expensive preferences, in the sense explained
and shown to be theoretically fruitful by Dworkin and Cohen, is for this
person to “need more income”, or, to put the point more generally, more
resources, than others do “simply to achieve the same level of [some
form of] welfare as those with less expensive preferences” (Dworkin
2000, 48), “be that form of welfare satisfaction of preference, or selfdevelopment, or good experience, or whatever other form of welfare is
brought into view” (Cohen 2004, 5-6). People who are very good at converting resources into welfare may have an anti-egalitarian preference that
they have more than others and still have cheap preferences overall in
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this sense – e.g. because they are very good at converting resources into
welfare and because they already have more welfare than others.8 So
construed, the concept of an expensive preference is essentially comparative. It describes a relationship between the preferences of two or
more persons. Accordingly, I might have preferences that are expensive
relative to one person and cheap relative to another.
The baseline governing whether someone has expensive preferences
and the expensiveness of satisfying other people’s preferences may not
converge. The baseline might be expensive relative to what it might have
been had this person acted differently or been subjected to different conditions. Alternatively, preferences can turn out to be expensive when the
difference between the quantity of resources required to achieve a certain
level of satisfaction and the minimum quantity of resources that would
have been required to achieve the same level of satisfaction had the agent
acted differently is higher than it is in the case of other individuals.9
Members of the present generation may have tastes that are expensive
(relative to those of previous generations) according to Dworkin’s definition, but not expensive (relative to those of previous generations) according to the definition just proposed. Although members of the present
generation use more resources to reach a certain level of satisfaction than
members of past generations, they could not have acted differently in a
way that ensured that they were capable of reaching this level of satisfaction with fewer resources, whereas members of past generations could
possibly have done so.
Thus far I have discussed what it means for preferences to be expensive and, more specifically, for members of one generation to have more
expensive preferences than that of another. I now turn to the moral
significance of the fact that someone’s preferences are expensive. Unlike
Rawls and Dworkin, Arneson and Cohen do not take the expensive taste
objection to show that the concept of welfare needs to be removed
wholesale from the metric of justice. Rather, it shows that “[w]e should
replace equality of welfare by equality of opportunity for welfare” (Cohen
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2010, 11; cf. Arneson 1991; 1989; italics mine). Hence, if the person with
expensive tastes and the person with inexpensive tastes initially had equal
opportunities for preference satisfaction, justice does not require the person who freely adopted more costly tastes to be brought up to the level
of welfare now enjoyed by the person with cheaper tastes. Cohen thinks
this response is truer to the underlying motivation of the expensive taste
objection.10
Applied to intergenerational justice, this view strikes me as plausible.
It seems correct to insist that we should transfer resources to future generations with preferences that are more expensive than ours only if the
expensiveness of those preferences is not the result of choices freely made
by members of the relevant future generations. Rawls might disagree on
the grounds that his position on non-compensation for expensive preferences is informed by his view of justice as a feature of relations of social
cooperation, relations that do not obtain between past generations with
cheap preferences and later generations with expensive preferences.
According to his view, therefore, there is no injustice in either compensating or not compensating expensive preferences across generations.
This Rawlsian reply is suspect, because it ties justice to the existence
of relations of social cooperation. Also, I do think we can imagine situations in which justice requires that we take into account expensive preferences and do not simply let the frustration these generate (in the absence
of a greater allocation of resources) fall on those who have such preferences. Consider the following case. G(eneration)1 can choose between
two policies both of which will give G2 and G3 the same quantity of
resources. The first policy will cause G3 to have expensive preferences;
the second policy will cause neither generation to have expensive preferences. Assuming everything else is equal, I believe it would be unjust for
G1 to choose the first policy thereby causing inequality of welfare between
future generations. If so, from a third person perspective at least, an
expensive preference is not, pace Rawls, simply something for which the
bearer of the preference bears full responsibility.11
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In a later treatment of the topic, Cohen (2004, 7-8) revises the position espoused in his 1989 article. First, he stresses that what matters is
not whether preference holders are responsible for having the preference,
but whether they can reasonably be held responsible for the fact that their
preference is expensive (cf. Arneson 1991). So if I cultivate a preference
for transportation by private car rather than by train, which I could not
possibly have foreseen would turn out to be expensive, because of soaring oil prices, according to Cohen I may be due compensation.
Second, Cohen’s 2004 position distinguishes between preferences
that are informed by valuational judgments and those that are not.12 An
example of the former is a preference for opera, where this preference
reflects the value judgment that a good life requires acquaintance with the
fine arts. An example of the latter might be a strong preference for back
massage that one has simply because it is pleasant without in any way
judging massage or the pleasant experiences it gives to have any value.13
Cohen believes that someone who has an expensive preference, which is
informed by valuational judgment and could be unschooled, or which the
holder deliberately chose to develop, may be entitled to compensation on
account of his or her expensive preference: “the subject’s approving identification with their expensive tastes […] is something that I regard as a
reason for offering it, since, where identification is present, it is, standardly, the agents’ very bad luck that a preference with which they strongly
identify happens to be expensive, and to expect them to forgo or restrict
satisfaction of that preference (because it is expensive) is, therefore, to
ask them to accept an alienation from what is deep in them” (2004, 7).14
Let us apply Cohen’s 2004 view to the issue of intergenerational
justice. More specifically, we shall consider the suggestion that, according
to this view, there is very little intergenerational injustice. Our preferences
may be much more expensive than those of people who lived in medieval
times. To reach the same level of satisfaction prior generations reached
by having Sundays off, members of the present generation need the
whole weekend off as well as several weeks of summer holidays, and the
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preferences of future generations might well be more expensive than
those of the present generation. According to Cohen’s 1989 view, egalitarians would be unwilling to compensate people for such preferences if
they could school themselves out of them. Our greater use of resources
than previous generations’ might, therefore, involve an injustice – it will
do so if we are capable of jettisoning the expensive preferences and habituating to scarcity. Similarly, there might be no injustice if our present use
of resources leads to the frustration of later generations’ expensive preferences, as long as these are preferences our descendants will be capable
of schooling themselves out of. However, on the assumption that the
expensive preferences are backed by valuational judgments – say, unlike
previous generations we believe leisure to be important to living a good
life – neither of these claims follows on Cohen’s 2004 view. On that view,
the present generation should transfer resources to allow future generations to satisfy their very expensive preferences, because these are
informed by valuational judgments. This looks like a powerful objection
to Cohen’s 2004 position. The implication of that position – that justice
is compatible with massive intergenerational inequalities provided that
these are suitably related to valuational judgments – is surely highly questionable and, accordingly, Cohen’s 1989 position delivers a more plausible
view of intergenerational justice than his 2004 view.15
III. CAUSING FUTURE GENERATIONS TO HAVE CHEAP PREFERENCES
I now wish to consider a quite separate challenge to the welfarist perspective on intergenerational justice. Suppose one generation can determine
whether the next generation has expensive or inexpensive tastes or, as
I shall put it, suppose one generation can engineer the next generation’s
tastes, e.g. through the way in which they educate its members or through
autonomy-circumventing techniques such as drugs or subliminal communication techniques. Imagine G(eneration)1 faces the following choice:
to preserve equality of welfare it can either abstain from using certain
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natural resources, which will then be available to satisfy G2’s preferences
that will be identical to those of G1, or it can somehow ensure that G2
develops cheap preferences, in which case G1 can use more resources and
leave fewer resources to future generations. Does G1 act unjustly if it fixes
things so that G2 has cheap preferences? If an injustice is involved, that
will count against not only equality of welfare but also equality of opportunity for welfare, since the two generations have equal opportunities for
welfare (Vrousalis forthcoming, 12).16 Call this the preference engineering objection.
In my view the preference engineering objection does little to undermine welfarist egalitarianism. First, I doubt that there is an egalitarian
objection to this sort of engineering. To see that the case sketched above
does not give rise to an egalitarian complaint, consider a scenario in which
a generation develops cheaper preferences to achieve equal satisfaction
for it and future generations with expensive tastes. This seems wholly
compatible with equality. If so, why should it make a difference, from an
egalitarian point of view, whether a generation develops cheap preferences or engineers a future generation to have cheap preferences?
Second, I do not think that engineering cheap preferences as such is
objectionable. Cheap preferences, perhaps especially their cultivation, are
often disparaged. This happens partly because it is assumed that such
preferences differ in kind from most of our preferences. But, as a matter
of fact, it is hardly surprising that few of us have the desire to direct
operas, to own the largest private collection of motorcycles, or to be the
first tourist who travels three times into space. Most of our preferences
are to varying degrees informed by the costs of their satisfaction. This is
good. It saves us a lot of frustration.17 And in some, but by no means all,
cases this is unproblematic.
The cases where making people holding cheap preferences rather
than expensive ones is unproblematic are those in which the preferences
are non-brute, i.e. reflect valuations. Our preferences are sometimes in
conflict with our evaluations – e.g. the preference for meat. Engineering
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to ensure that future generations have no such brute, expensive preferences would not be objectionable.18 In cases where the preferences are
based on valuations there is nothing problematic about ensuring that
people hold cheaper preferences provided they can reach those preferences through a sound deliberative route from their present evaluations.
In fact, I am inclined to take a stronger view of the range of cases in
which it is permissible to engineer future generations so that they hold
cheaper preferences. In this instance, we may well be not just permitted,
but even morally required to cause future generations to hold cheaper
preferences. Indeed some respectable environmental aims – e.g. changing
people’s preferences in relation to private versus public transportation or
in relation to air travel and holidays – involve precisely this. More specifically, if we can achieve equality across generations by ensuring that
future generations will have cheaper preferences than we have, we might
well be morally required to do so. Note that whether a preference is classified as cheap or expensive will depend on the baseline, and in the case
of future generations there are several possible suggestions as to what the
relevant baseline might be. If, for instance, the baseline is how costly the
relevant generations’ preferences would have been had we not intervened,
there is an obvious question about what, exactly, is problematic about our
acting with the aim of dictating whether preferences of future generations
will be costly.19
I conclude that reservations about the engineering of preferences do
not generate a strong objection to welfarist metrics. In fact, this particular line of attack has nothing specifically to do with welfarism versus
resourcism. If we were to determine people’s share of resources through
Dworkin’s auction, we could imagine future generations’ preferences
being engineered in such a way that the members of those generations
do not envy the resource bundles of previous generations, in which case
no inequality of resources obtains across generations. If preference engineering is a problem for welfarism, it is also a problem for Dworkinian
resourcism.20 Note, finally, that the line of argument explored in this
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section only presupposes that some ways of engineering future generations to have cheap preferences – e.g. non-autonomy-violating ways – are
morally permissible. Hence, it avoids commitment to the view that all
ways of engineering preferences of future generations are permissible.
IV. DWORKIN’S RESOURCISM AND SLAVERY OF THE TALENTED
I now set aside expensive preferences and turn to worries about the intergenerational variant of Dworkin’s slavery of the talented: the slavery of the
first generation. To understand this concern we need some background.
Dworkin’s favoured metric is resources. In his view, therefore, people
should be equal in the quantity of resources that they command. But how
do we compare different bundles of resources? According to Dworkin’s
view, we should apply the envy test (2000, 68-69), which says that we
should distribute resources and see if anyone prefers a bundle of resources
possessed by another. If this is the case, equality of resources does not
obtain and we should redistribute until we reach an envy free distribution.21
Which resources are relevant for the purpose of applying the envy
test? Clearly, external resources such as land and water should be included,
but what should we say about internal resources such as labour power (or
organs)? The question is tricky because, on the one hand, labour power
is clearly a resource, and people who command more of it, or more valuable kinds of it, than others command more resources. On the other
hand, labour power is closely tied to a person’s talents and personality in
such a way that people possess very different amounts of it, and addressing this inequality appears problematic. It is at this point that Dworkin’s
concern about the slavery of the talented enters the scene.
Dworkin imagines that external resources are distributed through an
auction at which everyone who participates bids and where all have equal
bidding power. The price of popular resources rises simply because they
have many bidders. Suppose internal resources are included in the
auction. Since people have very different skills and talents, talented people
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can expect that their labour power – essentially their time – will cost
much more than the labour power of the untalented. Hence, if I am a
talented person who would like some leisure, I will have to bid at the
auction for some of ‘my own’ time; and because, alternatively, I could be
very productive in the hours I would like to spend in leisure, others will
offer high bids for those hours. Accordingly, I will have to use a lot of
my bidding power to ensure that I obtain some leisure time. Similarly, if
I am a talented person who wants to spend some of my time in a job I
find fulfilling, but in which I am not particularly talented and which in
any case results in products few wish to buy, I will need to use a lot of
my bidding power to ensure that this is possible. Indeed, if we allow
coalitions of buyers to pool their resources and buy the labour power of
those with talent, I might end up owning none of my time, with the owners of my labour power dictating what I do.22 This, Dworkin submits, is
unfair. The result of the auction, so construed, would be…
[…] that each would have to spend his life in close to the commercially
most profitable manner that he could, or, at least if he is talented, suffer some very serious deprivation if he did not. For since Adrian, for
example, is able to produce prodigious income from farming, others
would be willing to bid a large amount to have the right to his labor
and the vegetables thereof, and if he outbids them, but chooses to
write indifferent poetry instead of farming full time, he will then have
to spend a large part of his initial endowment on a right that will bring
him little financial benefit. This is indeed the slavery of the talented
(1981, 311-312; 2000, 90).23
For those subscribing to welfarist theories of distributive justice, the slavery
of the talented objection is of perverse interest because it seems to pose no
problem at all for such theories. Welfarist egalitarians think that people
should be equal in terms of welfare, whether understood in terms of (ideal)
preference satisfaction or in terms of pleasant mental states.
They do not require talented people to have less welfare than others as a
result of spending their lives “close to the commercially most profitable
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manner”. They might see no injustice in talented people working more hours
than untalented people if, and to the extent that, this is compatible with
equality of welfare. Such compatibility might be preserved if, for example,
the kind of work talented people do is typically more rewarding than the
kind of work untalented people do. However, this hardly qualifies as slavery.
Hence, insofar as the slavery of the talented is a problem for egalitarian
theories of justice, it is a problem for resource-egalitarian theories only.
As a resource-egalitarian with real concerns about the slavery of the
talented, Dworkin obviously needs to address this problem. He does so
by excluding internal resources, e.g. labour, from the auction and the
envy test. However, before I sketch Dworkin’s response to the problem
of the slavery of the talented more fully in the next section, I want to
consider how the problem arises in an intergenerational context. Like
most theorists of justice, Dworkin focuses on intragenerational issues
and, thus, does not address the problem in an intergenerational setting.
So let us consider what happens when one applies the envy test and the
idea of an auction to a simple intergenerational setting. Imagine a hundred generations. They do not overlap: in an admittedly far-fetched biological progression, the members of one generation die at the very
moment those of the next are born. For some reason there will only be
one hundred generations. Suppose, moreover, that labour expended by
one generation improves the situation of all ensuing generations in that
it boosts the productivity-increase of all later generations. Hence, the
labour of the first generations makes a difference to the value of all later
generations, and in particular it makes a tremendous accumulated difference to the value of the labour of the last few generations. The labour
of the last generation makes no difference to any other generation. Suppose, finally, that members of one generation can direct members of any
generation, including previous ones, to employ their labour power in
whatever way they see fit provided they own it.24 So, by analogy to the
intragenerational case, if I own the labour power of a member of a previous generation I can employ it in way that benefits me the most.25
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In a case like this, the value of the labour of the first generation will
be much higher than that of the later generations. Many members of later
generations will want to bid for first-generational labour power, so members of the first generation will be obliged to use a lot of their bidding
power simply to ensure that they have any leisure at all. Indeed, if coalitions of buyers from several generations are permitted, they might find
that others completely outbid them in an auction for their time. If outbid,
members of later generations will then employ the labour power of the
first generation in a maximally productive way, thereby conferring maximum benefits on later generation.
It is important to see that in this case the first generation is not talented in any ordinary sense of the word, but in the sense that employing
its labour power results in much greater benefits for others (as a result of
how this employment positively affects the productivity of all later generations) than the employment of, say, the labour power of the last generation (which has no effect on the productivity of any other generation).
Its members could be less talented than those of later generations, and
their labour has greater value than that of later generations simply because
it is positioned at the start of the biological progression, where it is – for
convenience, let us say – ‘super-productivef’.26
It can be seen, then, that Dworkin’s slavery of talented objection arises
as a variant – involving super-productivityf – in the intergenerational setting.
Accordingly, if that objection is effective against resource-egalitarian theories of intragenerational justice, obliging us to treat labour power and other
resources differently, something similar would seem to follow in the case
of resource-egalitarian theories of intergenerational justice.27
V. WHY DWORKIN’S RESPONSE TO THE SLAVERY
FAILS IN THE INTERGENERATIONAL CASE
OF THE
TALENTED
Having presented the challenge of the slavery of the talented objection
in an intragenerational and intergenerational setting, I now describe
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Dworkin’s response to the problem in an intragenerational setting and
then explain why this response fails in an intergenerational setting and,
drawing on an objection by G. A. Cohen, explain why it does so in a way
that also casts doubt on whether Dworkin’s response works in the intragenerational setting. As I indicated above, Dworkin seeks to avoid the
problem of the slavery of the talented by excluding labour from the auction and the envy test. At the auction he settles upon, one cannot bid for
the labour power of others, and when one is determining whether some
envy the resource bundles of others, one should disregard the labour
power they command. By making this move, Dworkin’s theory avoids the
problem, as he diagnoses it, but it is also clear that he runs into another.
Some people might simply be endowed with high-value labour power,
and Dworkin is committed to the view that justice should be endowmentinsensitive. He thus needs some mechanism to address the inequality
between those who are endowed with high-value labour power and those
who are not. For that purpose, he proposes an insurance scheme in which
people insure themselves against deficiencies in talents. In principle, such
a scheme might lead to the same problematic results as Dworkin presumes will follow if we allow people to bid for each others’ labour power
at the auction. However, in practice it will not, since people would be
unwilling to insure themselves against not being among the most talented.
Supposing they were willing to do this, they would have to pay a very
large premium if they turned out to be among the very most talented, in
which case they would, in effect, be talented slaves.28
In the light of this response to the slavery of the talented, one might
suppose that one can make a similar move in an account of intergenerational justice by subjecting the labour of the talented to an insurance
scheme rather than the envy test and an auction. Unfortunately, it is not
immediately apparent that Dworkin’s insurance scheme can deal adequately with the intergenerational case. For whereas people in Dworkin’s
scheme would insure against not being sufficiently talented in the
standard sense – being untalented in this sense implies having fewer
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marketable skills and, thus, being deprived of benefits one would otherwise have had – they would not insure against not being super-productivef
in the way the first generation is relative to later generations. The benefits
of being super-productivef accrue to others, not to those who possess
super-productivityf and, accordingly, not being super-productivef does not
leave one worse off than one would otherwise have been and, thus, is not
a situation one would want to insure against. Indeed, assuming people are
ignorant of the generation to which they belong and wish to insure against
belonging to some particular generation, they will insure against belonging
to the first and poorest generation.
At this point, some might object against the idea of insuring against
being a member of the first generation that there is no way in which intergenerational compensation can be awarded in this case; but I do not think
this is true. The compensation – or at least, something relevantly like (self-)
compensation – might take the form of the first generation using a disproportionately large quantity of natural resources, leaving much less to
ensuing generations than they would have done had they merely used their
equal share.29 In any case, and as already noted, I discuss the justice of
distribution irrespective of the possibility of redistribution.
This discussion of Dworkin’s insurance device in an intergenerational
setting reveals something important: that the insurance device is not essentially tied to the elimination of inequalities of resources. One insures to
guarantee some kind of compensation in disadvantageous situations. In the
familiar intragenerational setting, Dworkin assumes that being untalented is
a disadvantage and that people gain from being talented; but in the intergenerational setting not being super-productivef (because one belongs to the last
generation) is not a disadvantage – the accumulative benefits that, ex hypothesis, result from exercising this talent accrue to members of later generations.
However, if the quantity of resources one commands can diverge from the
extent of the advantages that one takes into account when making up one’s
mind about the purchasing of insurance, equality of resources does not
guarantee equality of the relevant kind of advantage.30
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By way of further support for my claim that the insurance device is
not a device for ensuring equality of resources, because whether one takes
out an insurance against having a particular set of productive talents is
not only determined by the level of resources one commands in virtue of
these talents, consider Cohen and Dworkin’s disagreement regarding the
difference between welfarist and resourcist conceptions of egalitarian justice in connection with a rather different sort of case. To defeat Dworkin’s purely resourcist view, Cohen imagines a person who is very good
at controlling the movement of his limbs and very adept at moving them.
So in an important dimension he is more resourceful than the rest of us.
The problem is that he experiences pain whenever he moves his limbs.
In Cohen’s view, this person is worse off than the rest of us in a way that
is relevant from the perspective of egalitarian justice. Since he does not
have fewer resources than the rest of us – he is very capable of moving
his body – and the experience of pain is not a resource, but merely something that affects his welfare, this shows, Cohen argues, that welfare is
likewise relevant from the perspective of egalitarian justice.31
The bearing of this dispute on Dworkinian auctions – whether in an
intragenerational or intergenerational setting – can be readily appreciated
if we imagine a situation in which talented people do not need to concentrate on what they are doing in order to exercise their talents. Suppose
that there are great differences in people’s talents and hence productivity,
but that exercising one’s talents in productive labour is a bit like driving
on a deserted road in that it does not require one’s attention: thus, for
example, a talented brain surgeon can compose and even write down
poems while performing surgery. Whether or not they attend to what they
are doing, non-talented people cannot perform surgery, but the talented
person can do it inattentively without loss of quality or speed in his or
her work. The point here is that being at work does not prevent one from
doing the things one likes or prioritizes. Hence, there is no reason for
talented people, who put in many hours a day, to envy untalented people,
who do not. Of course, talented people do not count as less talented for
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this reason, or as people who do not command more internal resources
than untalented people. Hence, the ground for envy in Dworkin’s scenario cannot be that untalented people have more resources than talented
ones if labour is put up for bidding at the auction.32 I have proposed that
the envy test registers welfare as well.
VI. SLAVERY OF THE FIRST GENERATION: AN OBJECTION
So far I have proceeded on the assumption that resource-egalitarian
accounts of justice need to avoid productivity-sensitive enslavement. But
this is not something that can simply be assumed. Thus, in connection
with the intragenerational case some observers have argued that Dworkin
fails to give convincing egalitarian reasons for thinking that talents and
labour should not be auctioned. Miriam Cohen Christofidis pursues this
line of argument. In her view, the situation of the talented in intragenerational auction is nothing like slavery in the literal sense (2004, 32).
Admittedly, talented people might face a “severely restricted choice”.
They may have to devote most of their purchasing power at the auction
to ensuring that they control at least some part of their time. But it is not
clear that they end up worse off than others in a sense that ought to
trouble egalitarians. That would follow only if all that people cared about,
in relation to their jobs, was the number of hours they worked – the
fewer, the better. However, people care about other things too, including
how fulfilling their working lives are (Christofidis 2004, 36); and since,
typically, the jobs of talented people are more fulfilling than those of
untalented people, it may well be that hardworking talented people are
not envied by much less hardworking untalented people.
Can this line of argument be pressed into service to assuage worries
about the slavery of the super-productivef? I do not think so. In real life
there is every reason to believe that the further back we go in history
the less fulfilling jobs were. Nor would it matter if this contingent, historical claim were incorrect. We can simply stipulate that in the case of
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super-productivityf the jobs of the first generation are less fulfilling than
later jobs without exception. The ideal of equality of resource should give
the right answer in this hypothetical case as well. It does not. Christofidisstyle doubts about the slavery of the super-productivef cannot be marshalled at this point.
Let me summarize the discussion of the two last sections. We have
been concerned with resource-egalitarian accounts of distributive
justice. Many believe that, in the intragenerational setting, these accounts
have a problem avoiding the enslavement of the talented. If that is so,
then, in the intergenerational setting – specifically, in the far-fetched case
involving one hundred generations we have described – there is a similar problem with the slavery of the first generation, or as we have put
it, the super-productivef. While the problem may be softened in the case
of talented people, because they tend to have more fulfilling jobs, there
is no analogous way of softening it in relation to the super-productivef.
Moreover, it is not clear how Dworkin’s insurance scheme can be
applied in an intergenerational setting. In fact, insurance seems to be
problematic in both intragenerational and intergenerational settings.
I conclude that the slavery of the first generation, or the super-productivef, constitutes an important challenge to Dworkin’s resourcist
position.
VII. CONCLUSION
I have argued that two objections to welfarist accounts of the metric
of (intergenerational) justice, one from expensive tastes and the other
from the engineering of preferences, are unsuccessful. I have also presented reasons for thinking that Dworkin’s resourcist metric is incapable of handling a variant of the slavery of the talented – what I have
called the slavery of the first generation, or of super-productivityf –
convincingly.33
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WORKS CITED
Arneson, Richard. 1989. “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare.” Philosophical
Studies 56: 77-93.
Arneson, Richard. 1991. “Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity
for Welfare.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 19/2: 158-194.
Arneson, Richard. 2000. “Welfare Should Be the Currency of Justice.” Canadian Journal
of Philosophy 30/4: 497-524.
Cohen, G. A. 1989. “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice.” Ethics 99: 906-944
(reprinted in Cohen 2010, 3-43).
Cohen, G. A. 2004. “Expensive Tastes Ride Again.” In Dworkin and His Critics. Edited
by Justine Burley, 3-29. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cohen, G. A. 2008. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Cohen, G. A. 2010. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cohen Christofidis, Miriam. 2004. “Talent, Slavery, and Envy.” In Dworkin and His Critics.
Edited by Justine Burley, 30-44. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1981a. “What is Equality? Part I: Equality of Welfare.” Philosophy &
Public Affairs 10: 185-264 (reprinted in Dworkin 2000, 11-64).
Dworkin, Ronald. 1981b. “What is Equality? Part I: Equality of Resources.” Philosophy
& Public Affairs 10: 283-345 (reprinted in Dworkin 2000, 65-119).
Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dworkin, Ronald. 2004. “Replies.” In Dworkin and His Critics. Edited by Justine Burley,
339-395. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hansen, Rasmus Sommer and Søren Flinch Midtgaard. 2011. “Sinking Cohen’s Flagship
– or Why People with Expensive Tastes Should Not Be Compensated.” Journal of
Applied Philosophy 28: 341-354.
Keller, Simon. 2002. “Expensive Tastes and Distributive Justice.” Social Theory and
Practice 28: 529-552.
Knight, Carl. 2009. “Egalitarian Justice and Valuational Judgment.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6: 482-498.
McMahan, Jeff. 2002. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Page, Edward. 2007. “Intergenerational Justice of What: Welfare, Resources or Capabilities?” Environmental Politics 16: 453-469.
Rawls, John. 1982. “Social Unity and Primary Goods.” In Utilitarianism and Beyond.
Edited by Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen, 159-186. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scanlon, Thomas M. 1975. “Preference and Urgency.” Journal of Philosophy 72: 655-669.
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Schaller, Walter E. 1997. “Expensive Preferences and the Priority of Right: A Critique
of Welfare-Egalitarianism.” Journal of Political Philosophy 5: 254273.
Sumner, L. Wayne. 1996. Happiness, Welfare, and Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon.
Vrousalis, Nicholas. “Meeting Posterity’s Needs: Flourishing, Sustainability, and the
Metrics Question.” Forthcoming.
NOTES
1. An exception is Page (2007).
2. If they did, might not the metric of life-time equality similarly differ from the metric of
time-slice equality? And might not the relevant metric for comparing Gn with Gn+1 differ from the
relevant metric for comparing Gn+2 with Gn+3?
3. Ultimately, I am not certain that welfare is the metric of justice. The intrinsic preferences
people have for states of affairs other than those that involve their self-interest may count as well
from the point of view of egalitarian justice. In a world in which people have only other-regarding
preferences for species of non-human animals, it might be unjust if some people’s preferences in
favour of penguins’ welfare are satisfied, while other people’s preferences in favour of pigs’
welfare are unsatisfied. I do not address this issue elsewhere in this paper.
4. I assume that an unjust distribution can arise even if everyone acts in the best way possible to promote justice. Hence, I depart from a Dworkinian statist view, according to which
justice is primarily concerned with whether the state treats its citizens with equal concern and
respect. I believe this view is too narrow anyway (e.g. it does not allow us to ask questions about
international distributive justice).
5. Dworkin (2000, 48-59) presses a similar objection to equality of welfare.
6. While my argument does not rest on an empirical claim to the effect that later generations
tend to have more expensive preferences than earlier ones, the well-known mechanism of adaptive
preferences (Elster 1983, 109-140) supports this claim, given economic growth.
7. Even if the preference represents an objectionable stance, it remains unclear that egalitarians will not want to accommodate it. Similarly, a preference that one has less satisfaction than
others is an anti-egalitarian preference. It would, ironically, qualify as an expensive preference if
it is expensive to (reliably) satisfy, say, because comparisons of levels of satisfaction are very costly.
8. A hyper-egalitarian preference is one that is informed by the desire to have no greater
satisfaction, or not to consume more expensive goods, than others.
9. According to Cohen’s view of the normative significance of expensive tastes, this concept
of expensive tastes might be normatively more relevant than the concept Dworkin defines.
10. Dworkin thinks otherwise. For him identification rather than choice is of the essence
(cf. Scanlon [1975] on pilgrimage and compensation).
11. Normally, expensive preferences are discussed in relation to cases in which it is the
bearer of the preference who can cultivate it or refrain from so doing.
12. Cohen does not say what kind of valuational judgment he has in mind: prudential value
judgments or just any kind of value judgment, e.g. a judgment to the effect that although the
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universe is better for people having their expensive preference, their lives are not better on
account of them having this preference.
13. Cf. Arneson’s three indicators of the presence of a desire (1991, 162).
14. I am not sure what this implies with respect to a snob’s expensive, anti-egalitarian preferences. A snob may identify with his expensive preferences. More generally, it is unclear if Cohen
believes that the unreasonability in question is due to the fact that someone who alienates himself
from something deep in him invariably is worse off than unalienated others, or whether, independently of how alienation and equality are related, he thinks that the relevant unreasonability is
grounded in moral values other than equality.
15. For further discussion of expensive taste in an intragenerational setting, see Hansen and
Midtgaard (2011); Keller (2002); Knight (2009); Schaller (1997).
16. In his critique of preferentialism, Vrousalis imagines a situation in which the present
generation instils a “self-denial ethos” in future generations such that members of these have
“very cheap preferences” (Vrousalis, forthcoming, 12). It is not clear what such an ethos involves.
If it amounts to valuing getting along on few resources, instilling such an ethos need not be
objectionable. If it amounts to valuing a second-order preference that one has less preferencesatisfaction than others, such as past generations, it might be objectionable. But then it is not
clear why a fully informed individual who knows about the genesis of such a preference would
have such a preference. Accordingly, it is unclear that the case is a counterexample to all forms
of welfarism.
17. We do not only care about the amount of satisfaction of preferences; but we care about
this as well.
18. You might think that certain ways of causing others to have or not have preferences
are problematic, perhaps because they infringe upon autonomy, but this would not be to deny
that the engineered person’s preferences bear on his or her welfare.
19. There are two ways in which we can affect this matter: by affecting the content of the
future generations’ preferences or by affecting whether satisfying them will be expensive when
they are held.
20. It might be suggested that this claim is false in view of Dworkin’s clause to the effect
that the personalities of the participants in the auction are authentic, i.e. that “they have been
formed under circumstances appropriate to using an auction among personalities so formed as a
test of distributive equality” (2000, 483 note 27). This requires that, prior to the auction, participants have had “both an opportunity to form and reflect on their own convictions, attachments,
and projects, and an opportunity to influence the corresponding opinions of others, on which
their own success in the auction in large part depends” (2000, 160). The former opportunity
certainly seems to clash with autonomy-circumventing ways of engineering the preferences of
future generations, whereas the latter opportunity, in an intergenerational setting, seems to allow
for bi-directional engineering of preferences. In response, I note, first, that my reply does not
appeal to autonomy-circumventing ways of engineering preferences. Second, insofar as Dworkin
does allow for some autonomy-compatible ways of engineering the preferences of future generations, his account is no different from welfarist egalitarianism in this respect. (Recall that here, i.e.
in the sentence to which this note is attached, I do not claim that preference engineering is a
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problem for welfarism – indeed, I do not think it is. I am simply claiming that if it is, it is also
problem for Dworkin’s theory.)
21. It is not clear to me what to say about cases in which A envies B’s bundle and B envies
A’s bundle. Clearly, one can improve on this situation, but I am not sure this would be an
improvement in terms of equality. More generally, it is far from clear that there is any egalitarian
reason to rerun the auction, as Dworkin believes, when everyone envies the resource bundles of
all others to an equal degree.
22. In his reply to Christofidis, Dworkin responds that a talented person “could, if she wished,
borrow enough to purchase control of herself” (2004, 351). Others might likewise borrow to purchase control of the talented person, but the talented person could borrow more money than others
could “because it is less expensive to monitor debt service than it is constantly to ensure that an
employee is working to the exact limit of her high-production endurance” (Dworkin 2004, 351).
This reply is unconvincing for two reasons. First, it involves an appeal to what is at best a contingent
truth about how loan markets and the like function, and it is difficult to see how a fundamental
question of justice – to wit, whether labour is to be assessed in the same way as external resources
for the purpose of determining whether equality of resources is satisfied – can be determined by
such facts. Suppose that technologies or the human psyche change in such a way that it becomes
more, not less, “expensive to monitor debt service than it is constantly to ensure that an employee is
working to the exact limit of her high-production endurance”. Then Dworkin would have to concede Christofidis’ point. Second, it is ad hoc to introduce the possibility of borrowing money, which
can then be used at the auction to bid for resources. If the auction is to serve as a device for ensuring the equal distribution of resources, participants must a have equal buying power. But if participants can borrow extra bidding power on the basis of their talents, an inequality between the participants emerges that undermines the auction’s capacity to model equality of resources.
23. See Christofidis’ comment on Dworkin’s claim that a talented person would have to “to
spend his life in close to the commercially most profitable manner that he could” (Christofidis
2004, 34). Note, incidentally, that Dworkin’s use of the expression “serious deprivation” in the
quotation above is somewhat puzzling. Ex hypothesi talented Adrian does not command less
resources than others do. He may envy others, if Dworkin is right, but this could simply show
that Dworkin’s envy is sensitive to factors other than resources. Christofidis thinks – rightly in
my view – that this takes us into the territory of welfarism (cf. Arneson 1989, 89).
24. Someone might object to the thought experiment I sketch here that running the envy
test and an auction on external resources in an intergenerational setting seems very artificial. In
response, I note that intergenerational distributive justice forms an important part of a general
theory of distributive justice and, thus, that in so far as Dworkin’s two devices can be used to
model the requirements of distributive justice in general they should likewise be applicable in an
intergenerational setting.
25. This is an outlandish assumption given the impossibility of backward causation. However, if it is not granted, Dworkin’s theory of distributive justice is incomplete in that it does not
speak to the issue intergenerational justice.
26. The subscript “f” is to remind us that the enhanced productivity is linked to being a
member of the first generation.
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27. In discussions of intergenerational justice the issue of the moral status of possible people becomes unavoidable. Applied to the auction, when that is used to elucidate intergenerational
justice, the issue becomes this: who can bid for resources? One option would be to say that only
those people who actually exist at some point in time should be included in the group of people
who bid at the auction. Another option would be to say that all people of whom it is true that
there is a distribution such that these people would exist under this distribution can bid. Both
options look problematic. If we go for the second, the problem of the slavery of the super-productivef members of the first generation becomes more serious. Suppose that the number people
who will exist in later generations depends on the productive efforts of the first generation. The
greater those efforts are, the larger the volume of food later available, and the larger the volume
of food available, the more descendants there will be. In this scenario, the first generation will
have to outbid not only people who will actually exist in the future, but also people who would
exist if the first generation were to use its time productively; and presumably the demand for the
first generation’s labour power might be such that its members end up leading lives that, in welfarist terms, are not worth living. For present purposes, I can set aside this issue, which, in my
view, spells difficulties for Dworkin’s theory applied to intergenerational justice independently of
the problem of the slavery of the talented.
28. Precisely for this reason it is not clear that the device guarantees the realization of equality (cf. Dworkin 2000, 104-105).
29. Some might think that loss of leisure cannot always be compensated for by extra consumption of natural resources. I agree, but this does not affect the point I make here, namely that
there is some way in which intergenerational compensation can take place. In any case, since I am
not defending Dworkin’s insurance device as a way of modelling the concern for endowmentinsensitivity, I am not committed to the claim that the insurance device works well in all case or,
for that matter, at all. A further problem concerns how one sets the value of those extra resources
members of the first generation could consume by way of compensation. In practice this is impossible to do by way of a Dworkinian action, but recall that in the thought experiment I am imaging
that members of all generations are present at the auction and are able to bid for the resources
being sold. Hence, in this hypothetical context there is no intergenerational problem of value
setting.
30. If Dworkin’s claim about willingness to ensure against having the talents of a movie star
etc. were true, the insurance scheme would allow for very considerable inequalities between generations.
31. Cohen defends what he calls “access to advantage” as the relevant metric of egalitarian
justice. Advantage includes both resources (as in the case of the Tiny Tim) and welfarist elements.
In response to Cohen’s objection, Dworkinians often respond that the criterion for whether
something represents a handicap and, thus, an internal resource deficiency for a person is whether
this person views the relevant condition as a disadvantage and, if possible, would take a painless
pill to remove it. While I cannot do justice to this reply here, I think Cohen has offered a compelling critique of it (2000, 17; 24). Note also that to say that something is a mere ‘resource’ in this
Dworkinian sense is compatible with saying that it is something that, non-instrumentally, makes
this person’s life go better or worse. This shows that Dworkinians do not mean by ‘resources’
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what we normally mean by the term, since if something is a mere resource in this sense it does
not in itself determine our welfare. I thank Hugh Lazenby for pointing out the need to address
this response to Cohen.
32. Dworkin seems to define resources as things that can be “used […] in making something valuable out of one’s life” (2000, 80). Talents are resources in this sense, according to
Dworkin.
33. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Université catholique de Louvain,
March 24, 2011, and at the University of Turku, October 13, 2011. I thank the following persons
for very helpful, critical responses: Richard Arneson, Daniel Attas, Axel Gosseries, Nicole Hassoun, Nils Holtug, Eerik Lagerspetz, Hugh Lazenby, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Juha Räikka, Nicholas
Vrousalis, and Peter Vallentyne. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers of this journal
for many suggestions for improvement.
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