Morality and Injustice

William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, described this inherent, natural law in the following way:

"When [God] created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws"

It was only after establishing this basis for law that Blackstone asserted the following about inequality:

"The law not only regards life and member, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them, but also furnishes him with everything necessary for their support. For there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life, from the more opulent part of the community, by means of several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor." (http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/blackstone)

Unfortunately, the prevalent theory about law in most law schools today is the Instrumentalist Theory advocated by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This theory views law as just a tool, an instrument used to achieve the evolving goals of modern society. Holmes claimed:

"Men make their own laws... these laws do not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, and... judges are not independent mouthpieces of the infinite." (Francis Biddle, Justice Holmes, Natural Law and the Supreme Court, (1960) p. 49)

Not surprisingly, Holmes' attitude towards humanity is one of indifference:

"I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand" (Holmes-Pollock Letters, ed. Mark Dewolfe Howe, vol. 2).

With such a view of humanity, there is no reason to find inequality unjust. It is only by establishing the inherent dignity of human beings that we can begin to discuss the relationship between inequality and injustice.

-- JeffreyPan - 08 Feb 2010

• John, here is how I would distill my hypotheticals: The only world in which there would be no injustice due to inequality is in a world of infinite resources where it takes no work to harvest those resources. This is slightly different from a world that has infinite resources in which it does take work to harvest those resources. In regard to the word "improve" I used it to mean: to get something one does not need. This is why I distinguished between taking something one needs and taking something to improve oneself. Essentially, yes, I was using "improve" to refer to a taking motivated by greed.

• Regardless, the venture into hypotheticals that diverge wildly from our world does not really serve to illuminate much. I thought it interesting to contemplate whether inequality could ever not be unjust. But I think one would be hard-pressed to argue, absent an argument based on the pillar of callousness, that the inequality found in our world is inherently unjust.

• I understand what you are saying. But I would argue that the very composition of the world in which we live is unjust. It is unjust for a human soul, without any form of consent, to suddenly find itself in a world of scarce resources. Regardless of how our universe came to be, it was created in a fundamentally unjust way. You might argue that in order for something to be unjust, an actor must have perpetrated it. I disagree. I think something is unjust when it is not in accordance with the principles of justice, regardless of whether no actor caused it to come into being or if there is no alternative.

I heartily defend the notion that there should be a cap on yearly income. To clarify, this cap would be on yearly income, not on total wealth. I do not think it would be disastrous. Here is how I would summarize the argument I will make below: Even with a $2 million cap on yearly income, there would still be people to do all the jobs that are being done now, even if a bunch of rich people left. Our economy would not be hurt.

To explain why, let us start by discussing Communism. Why has Communism shown itself to be disastrous? The answer is that there are no incentives for people to work to uphold the economy. People have no incentives to work: there are no incentives to be a CEO and no incentives to be a street sweeper. If everybody gets paid the same no matter what they do or even if they willfully choose not to work (which I take to be the true definition of Communism), then there are no incentives to really do anything. In another version of Communism, the government will decide what job you do. This is disastrous because the government does not calculate supply and demand in the appropriate ways to ensure a maximally functioning economy.

If a range of incomes are possible ($0 per year to $2 million per year), then different jobs can still be priced differentially, in accordance with supply and demand. This provides a mechanism for the same economy we have today. Let us suppose that someone who makes $50 million a year decides to leave the country after we impose this income cap and moves to another country where he can make his $50 million in peace. Good riddance, then. I would argue that enough people exist in this industrious country that have the intelligence and skill level to do that person's job. And there are enough people in this country with the necessary skill level who would be perfectly happy with a $1.5 or $2 million a year job.

Even with a $2 million cap then, the economy would still function. The same jobs would be performed as are now. The same transactions would exist. Note that corporations are still allowed under the income cap to possess and manipulate larger amounts of money per year than $2 million; the cap only applies to income that is annexed to one's own personal control.

In addition to not destroying the economy, we would succeed in establishing a more equitable distribution of wealth. If companies were limited in what share of profits they could give to any one individual, the result is that people farther down the chain of command would start making more money.

What about the taxes? I would argue that the total national income would still be the same under this plan. But there is a valid point to be made against this plan. That is, we would still lose money in tax revenues because we would not have the benefit of extreme tax rates that affect the ultra rich. (Consider two situations in which the national income is $100. In situation A, 100 people have $1. In situation B, 1 person has all $100. We might get a dime from each of the $1 earners, totaling $10 in taxes, but we would get $40 from the $100 earner.) Two responses: 1) The more equal distribution of money is itself a benefit to society, and I would accept that the government gets less tax revenues if a more equal distribution of money took place. 2) In addition, the more equally distributed money is, the less we need tax revenues to fund social welfare programs that seek to remedy this very thing.

But regardless, I return to my main point, which is that even with a $2 million cap on yearly income, there would still be people to do all the jobs that are being done now, even if a bunch of rich people left. Our economy would not be hurt.

1. How can a lawyer, whose job is to service a client, use the judiciary to prevent “individuals from leveraging their superior position to inflict harm on those in inferior positions”? I am assuming that the individual doing the leveraging is Party A to the case and our client is the lesser-positioned Party B. In that situation, successfully arguing B’s case (and perhaps winning a hefty damage award) could maybe lead to a little less inequality. But what happens if you find yourself on the wrong side of the courtroom, and you’re defending Party A? You’re obligated to “use the judiciary” to proffer the determination that you have won your case, and nothing more. Perhaps you are suggesting that before using the judiciary, a lawyer should take care to select clients whose causes, if won, will contribute to lessening that inequality divide?

2. Agreed on Mr. Zorn’s point about the income tax suggestion. There are a host of reasons why that idea, while admirable on paper, is problematic in practice, the first of which is that many of the nation’s great cultural institutions, public educational programs and charitable organizations would cease to function, their being largely dependent on large private donations. Another big problem is that the nation’s one percent might declare a civil war (joking, sort of).

This conversation is not addressing the issue, any more than a discussion about why it is or is not important to achieve justice in individual cases if injustice as a whole can never be eliminated. Both are as silly as a discussion about the ethics of tax policy that takes up no question more difficult than whether confiscatory taxation is a good idea. You can't demonstrate commitment to having a discussion by trivializing it.