A more difficult area of potential governance reform concerns distributive justice, spanning a range of issues not fully amenable to either cost-benefit or philosophical analysis. Distributive justice can be informed by cost-benefit analyses, but in the end, purely objective decision-making is impossible, and government needs the best systems and protocols with which to measure and reflect the citizenry’s collective wisdom of feelings, and to do so as openly, deeply and consciously as possible. Ultimately, as Adam Smith wrote: “No man during, either the whole of his life, or that of any considerable part of it, ever trod steadily and uniformly in the path … of justice, … whose conduct was not principally directed by a regard to the sentiments of the supposed impartial spectator, of the great inmate of the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct.”[1] We need to acknowledge this attribute of distributive justice and find a way to systematically and consciously incorporate empathetic feelings into government’s process of forming such judgments, while also cognizant of costs and benefits as best they can be identified. In the philosophical literature, discussion of distributive justice weighs equity and desert, need and equality, utilitarianism and welfare economics, but in the end reaches no actionable guidelines for decision making[2]. The fundamental problem is that judgments of fairness and distributive equity require an application of empathy and feeling to evaluate fully the particular context where conflicting claims need to be balanced. Our current system of representative democracy is one such way, but perhaps there are other better ways in certain cases or for certain types of issues.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on distributive justice, “Only when people realized that the distribution of economic benefits and burdens could be affected by government did distributive justice become a live topic. Now the topic is unavoidable. Governments continuously make and change laws affecting the distribution of economic benefits and burdens in their societies. Almost all changes, from the standard tax and industry laws through to divorce laws have some distributive effect, and, as a result, different societies have different distributions. Every society then is always faced with a choice about whether to stay with the current laws and policies or to modify them.”[3] Best practices in government would take responsibility for government’s distributive effects and would design policies with full awareness and acceptance of the distributive consequences. Private charity and redistributive efforts can be encouraged with incentives, but in the end, government bears responsibility for the ultimate shape of how equities are distributed across society because only government touches all aspects of society and oversees and sets the overall shape of distributive justice through its spending, taxation and other actions.
Under current practice, government either addresses distributive justice issues reluctantly, as with maintaining a social safety net and making transfers to the poor, or pretends no transfer exists, as with policies that subsidize economic beneficiaries of public lands and resources. Distributive justice issues arise in tax policies, social services, health services, housing and mortgage programs, agricultural subsidies, transportation infrastructure projects, governmental research, education, military procurement and deployment, and every government tax or expenditure where the beneficiaries differ from those who bear the costs.
Direct democracy might be a good way to decide, as a society, how much should be set aside to help the poor or otherwise disadvantaged, in one’s local community, nationwide and internationally. Phrased in this way, the issues are relatively straight forward and polling the feeling judgment of society as a whole would be appropriate in this context. Once decided in the overall amount, the details of execution could be handed over to managers expert at deploying this sum most effectively, be these managers in public, private or non-profit sectors. Similarly, direct democracy might be the appropriate approach to other distributive justice issues. What is the proper sacrifice of present consumption for investments in education and basic science to benefit future generations? The multifaceted balance between humankind and the natural environment is a distributive justice issue, in the sense that in government’s role as protector of the environment, a public good, it strikes a balance between the needs of humanity and those of nature. How much wilderness and natural habitat should be set aside or restricted as to human use and/or dedicated to protect endangered species of both fauna and flora? How clean should we maintain our air, water and land, and at what cost? Feeling judgments are needed to frame policy, while execution can be handed over to the best managers.
The empathy and feeling judgment required to determine distributive justice and fairness outcomes are qualities naturally cultivated and shaped in adolescence. In important respects the balance of equities along all these broad dimensions of distributive equity characterizes society’s level of compassion and acceptance of responsibility. In the end, a nurturing society can be expected to be generous across distributive justice issues generally. Environmentalism, the first of the distributive justice issues to garner broad public support, has grown rapidly around the world in recent decades, and presumably the other aspects of distributive justice will soon become equally pressing. In recent decades the courts have debated whether trees and animals can have rights and legal standing, the mere raising of which subject suggests a loosening of humankind’s self-centeredness and a maturing of society’s sense of responsibility, and cooperative mindedness.
[1] Adam Smith (1759) p. 357
[2] James Konow, “Which is the Fairest One of All? A Positive Analysis of Justice Theories”, Journal of Economic Literature, December 2003.
[3] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive, p.3