The Solidarity Solution

What is a fair income distribution? The empirical literature seems to assume that equal income would be fair, but the equal income answer faces two objections. First, equal income is likely to be inefficient. This book sets aside efficiency concerns as a downstream consideration; it seeks to identify a fair distribution. The second objection—pointed out by both leftist political philosopher G. A. Cohen and conservative economist Milton Friedman—is that equal income is unfair to the hardworking. Measuring labor burdens in order to adjust income shares, however, is no easy task. Some philosophers and economists attempt to sidestep the measurement problem by invoking the envy test. Yet a distribution in which no one prefers someone else’s circumstances to her own, as the envy test requires, is unlikely to exist—and, even if it does exist, the normative connection between the envy test and fairness has not been established. The Solidarity Solution provides a novel answer: when someone claims that her situation should be improved at someone else’s expense, she must be able to give a reason that cannot be rejected by a free and equal individual who regards everyone else as the same. Part I develops the solidarity solution and shows that rigorous distributive implications can be derived from a relational ideal. Part II uses the solidarity solution to critique the competing theories of Ronald Dworkin, Philippe Van Parijs, and Marc Fleurbaey. Finally, part III identifies insights for the gender wage gap and taxation.

Greatness of Soul

Part 1 explores how thinkers in the Islamic world received the ancient virtue of greatness of soul by focusing on one particular ‘virtue of greatness’ found in works of Arabic philosophical ethics. Greatness of soul appears in the works of prominent Muslim thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Miskawayh, and al-Ghazālī under the Arabic term kibar al-nafs. In Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s classifications of the virtues and vices, it is defined in terms approximating to Aristotle’s account. The overall treatment of the virtue is cursory yet apparently approving. This will seem surprising given the oft-remarked conflict of the virtue, particularly in its Aristotelian version, with an ideal of humility. Did thinkers in the Arabic tradition take a different view of this ideal? Part 1 investigates this question by offering a substantive reading of Miskawayh’s and, more concertedly, al-Ghazālī’s account of the ethics of esteem and self-esteem. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing together an account of al-Ghazālī’s ethical commitments. Yet the author’s conclusion is that al-Ghazālī privileges the virtue of humility and denigrates the status of honour as a good. The virtue of magnanimity he incorporates in his tables of the virtues thus appears to be in profound conflict with his considered ethical viewpoint, and with values central to Islamic religious morality more broadly. Why then does al-Ghazālī (like Miskawayh) pass this conflict over in silence? Part 1 concludes with some suggestions about this puzzle and about what it may have to tell us about these thinkers’ engagement with ancient philosophy.

Hegel’s Shepherd’s Way Out of the Thicket

Our modern conditions require a reflective stance on our lives. Yet it is also clear that some forms of domination have continued to be practiced long after their insufficiencies have been exposed. What is actual and what lies behind the various appearances of our social and political world has never been fully actualized. This chapter examines this sense of being ready to unsettle our settled convictions through experiences that push us to think of what we have been doing up until now as something illusory and not as merely not living up to an explicit ideal. Part of the unsettling feature of modernity is that we can think that we have at least settled what we take to be at stake even while admitting that we have not lived up to such ideals, only to find that we turn out not to have settled what really was at stake.

A PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE LOOKS AT IDEALIZATION IN POLITICAL THEORY

Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have argued that political theory should be focused instead on providing solutions to the manifest injustices of the real world. In this essay, I offer a defense of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction according to which it amounts to nothing more than a division of labor, and explore some scientific analogies. Rawls’s own focus on the ideal part of the theory, I argue, stems from a felt need to clarify the foundations of justice, rather than a utopian neglect of real world problems.