Reading Interrogations for Equality Seminar Week 8. Work October 22, 2009 Gina Schouten I’m wondering what Arneson’s arguments have to say about the following (admittedly underspecified) position regarding the distribution of meaningful work: Social institutions should be arranged such that everyone has a genuine opportunity to engage in meaningful work, either because having that opportunity is a valuable contribution to human flourishing, or because the work itself is a valuable contribution to human flourishing which may nonetheless be foregone in favor of other such contributions or none at all. (Though I envision this position to be asserting the value of meaningful work or the opportunity for it on a broader construal of what “meaningful” means than the one that Arneson adopts, I think I can just accept the definition he uses for the point of what I say here.) I am interested in thinking more about one main argument that Arneson offers to the effect that the above type of principle does not justify state intervention to fairly distribute this opportunity. The argument I have in mind goes something like this: Given the very many different sources of human flourishing, such a position will, in practice, tend to support policies of state neutrality regarding meaningful work—that is, they will not support an institutionalized right to opportunities for meaningful work. A society, therefore, is not compelled by the principle I have described to adopt policies “that encourage people to choose artisan work and reject assembly-line work” (526-7). Fair enough. But what about policies to ensure that those who choose assembly-line work do not do so because of an unfairly constrained set of options, and that when they do so because of an unavoidably constrained set of options, there are other compensatory sources of comparable value available to them (such as, for example, a noncompetitive opportunity to work to further a cause that they support, and that they can pursue during the leisure time that their comparably higher pay affords them). Such a policy seems to go beyond the market socialism that Arneson endorses, but I don’t yet see how his arguments against state intrusion beyond the parameters he sets for it apply against these types of policies. Am I wrong in thinking that Arneson would oppose the position I describe and the policies I think are supportable by it? If not, how does his argument against it work? (Additionally, I don’t think the principle I describe above entails that we should “keep a desk in Whitehall” open for those who choose to forego meaningful work (533).) Noel Howlett The principle linked to works states that remuneration for work should reflect “how hard we have worked, how long we have worked, and how great a sacrifice we have made in our work. We shouldn’t get more because we use more productive tools, have more skills, or have greater talent, much less should we getInterrogations Sociology 915 & Philosophy 955. Session 8 2 more because we have more power or own more property. We should get more only by virtue of how much effort we have expended or how much sacrifice we have endured in our useful work.” This principle of remuneration is in keeping with the strong intuition of many egalitarians that a just system of payment for work rewards “only what we can affect and not what is beyond our control” (Wright, pp. 179). This particular passage gave me some trouble in reading for this week. While I find most of it agreeable, I struggle to wrap my head around “we shouldn’t get more because we…have more skills, or have greater talent…” I find a strong distinction between equal and just, and room within that distinction for the differences in people to be valued and rewarded unequally. While egalitarianism can speak to many of my concerns in social justice, in this sense it carries with it an aspect that may make in untenable for me. Perhaps I am just failing to see the social economy (“all production in Albert’s parecon is organized on the direct provision for needs on principles of reciprocity and voluntary association” (Wright, pp. 181)) over the economic conception I have been raised in, but I believe there may be good reasons to value and reward people based on talent and skill as opposed to just based on need. It is unclear to me if these reasons are a) unegalitarian, b) part of a plan to create/maintain an elite that will benefit the least well off, or c) part of some other conception of fairness in which resources may be distributed unequally so long as the distribution is done fairly. Arneson speaks to part of my concern in the quote that I began with saying: “whether a particular job strikes a particular person as interesting depends not just on her inborn abilities but also on how these abilities have been developed into talent by education or other experience” (Arneson, pp. 522). I find that the distinction between skills/abilities and talent further complicates things. Albert speaks to rewarding people based on how hard they have work and how much they have sacrificed. However, it is unclear to me if this principle applies only in the present or in the sacrifices in developing a skill or talent can reasonably convey greater standing for rewards throughout one’s life. This may be something akin to private ownership of one’s talents, like property, and therefore undesirable in a parecon. Clearly, access to the resources to develop abilities into talents is not equal and thus rewarding such development can perpetuate standing inequalities in profoundly unjust ways. This may in fact be where my struggle begins. If we could alter this access inequality and all people would have equal access to the resources needed to develop their talents, would the egalitarian still have a problem with remuneration that is based in part on talent/skill? Kevin Cunningham Arneson argues that a pluralistic perfectionist ought to be state neutral to meaningful work. Specifically, he holds that perfectionism in practice reduces to welfarism in principle. His argument runs something like the following. Any perfectionist theory would have to be disjunctive because there are many human goods that are equally worthwhile to preserve. So, one labor organization (an efficient business) might realize one value, while another (a workers’Interrogations Sociology 915 & Philosophy 955.