Existential stances

What is existential conservatism? Simply put, it is an existential stance – i.e. an orientation towards the given – that seeks to discover, appreciate, affirm, and conserve what is good in the world as it is or as given. The given here is of two general kinds: the cultural-political given and the natural given. The cultural-political given is that which human beings have built up and handed on over the generations, and it includes political institutions and moral precepts along with achievements of art, literature, philosophy, and religion as well as the forms of belonging (families, neighborhoods, nations, etc.) we find ourselves in. The natural given includes the wider natural world as well as our human nature and our own natural talents and abilities.

The stance of the existential conservative contrasts with existential stances that emphasize a repudiation of the given. One such stance is that of the radical progressive who repudiates the given world in light of some imagined ideal future world. Another such stance is that of the person who seeks to return to some supposed ‘golden age’ of the past. By contrast, for the existential conservative there is an emphasis on affirming and inhabiting the present. We see this in Michael Oakeshott's description of the conservative disposition as centring on ‘a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be’: ‘Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness to what is available, and consequently the acknowledgement of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing what is past and gone’.Footnote ¹

The radical progressive and the golden ageist are both agreed in finding the given world to be a disappointment. And this raises the problem of cosmodicy: is life in the world worthwhile in the face of evil and suffering? For the radical progressive this can only be answered positively insofar as we see ourselves as moving towards realizing some ideal future. Likewise, for the golden ageist we must see ourselves as recovering some ideal past. But the danger in both cases is that we will despair over attaining (or approximating) the ideal given that the world as it is will always fall drastically short of the ideal. The existential conservative, by contrast, aims to address the problem of cosmodicy not by attempting to realize some ideal future or to recover some ideal past, but rather by seeking to discover, appreciate, affirm, and conserve what is good in the given world, which enables one to find his or her way to an affirmation that life in the world is good and worthwhile, and that it is good to be here rather than never to have been. Indeed, the goal is to feel at home in the given world.

It can of course happen that a person seeks to affirm that life in the world is good and worthwhile but finds doing so extremely difficult because of undergoing great hardship, such as experiencing the death of a loved one, or having a debilitating condition, or living under an oppressive regime. There is always the possibility that one might fail at adequately addressing the problem of cosmodicy and end up feeling crushed or falling into despair. Without denying such possibilities, the existential conservative attempts to find and affirm what is good in the given world even when life is experienced as a vale of tears.Footnote ² And this is predicated upon the belief that there is in fact good in the given world and that it is our task to discover, affirm, appreciate, and conserve it as best we can. But this affirmative stance is not predicated upon a belief that the given world is entirely as it should be. The existential conservative can and should acknowledge that there is a great deal of evil in the world that should not be affirmed and indeed should be rejected precisely because of the good that is affirmed. For instance, affirming that human life is a ‘gift’ or a great good to be cherished, promoted, and protected means that one must stand opposed to all that threatens human life. Thus, the existential conservative will seek reform to remove such threats to human life, and this reform is sought precisely in order to conserve what is good. However, the existential conservative also believes that evil will never be fully eradicated while we are on this mortal coil and yet the given world is worth affirming.

The crucial point is about our orientation towards the given world. We can state what is at issue here in terms of the following question: is our basic outlook on the world as it is centred on affirmation or repudiation, yes-saying or no-saying? These are not mutually exclusive options, but the question concerns the emphasis of a particular outlook. The existential conservative, in contrast to the radical progressive and the golden ageist, is fundamentally affirmative: there is an emphasis that the world, as it is and in spite of its evils and imperfections, is meaningful and worth affirming; i.e. the given world as a whole is good and is a source of joy and fulfillment, even if not everything about it is good and even if there are ways, whether minor or major, that it should be made better. Radical progressivism and golden ageism are of course not without affirmation, but the focus of affirmation is on an ideal future or an ideal past by which one critiques and seeks a thoroughgoing change of the present. Their attitude towards the given world emphasizes repudiation and a sense of indignation. The existential conservative, by contrast, first seeks to count his or her blessings, to take stock of what is good about the given world, before figuring out how to make it better. In other words, an emphasis on gratitude or appreciation is at the heart of existential conservatism.

This is exemplified in the work of G. K. Chesterton, who in his autobiography tells us that the chief idea of his life is ‘the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted’.Footnote ³ And elsewhere he writes: ‘I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder’.Footnote ⁴ The sort of thanks that he is discussing here we can call ‘existential thanks’, and such thanks are ‘the highest form of thought’ because they give appreciative attention to the fundamental fact of the sheer gratuitousness of existence (i.e. the undeserved goodness of the given world). Chesterton brings out this sheer gratuitousness of existence in the following passage:

The last sentence here addresses the problem of cosmodicy: with existential gratitude we affirm that life in the world is worthwhile even in the face of evil and suffering.

For Chesterton, there is an integral connection between such existential gratitude and theism since it is to God that our thanks are ultimately due for the sheer gratuitousness of existence (though more immediately they are due to our parents). Indeed, he writes: ‘the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank’.Footnote ⁶ Elsewhere he considers an imagined critic who questions why someone ‘cannot be thankful for grass and flowers without connecting it with theology’, to which he responds: ‘[Such a person] cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless’.Footnote ⁷ The idea here is that gratitude involves a ‘to-for’ structure: we are thankful to someone for some gratuitous good.Footnote ⁸ What existential gratitude requires then is someone who is the ultimate source of the undeserved good of one's existence and of all existence and to whom he or she is thankful, which includes a feeling of indebtedness and a desire to pay back the debt in some way. However, I think we can allow a metaphorical extension of existential gratitude for those who want to speak about life as a ‘gift’ as a way of expressing their appreciation for the undeserved good of life, even though, strictly speaking, they do not believe that life is a gift, but rather it is just good luck. In any case, with regard to the cultural-political given both theists and non-theists can appropriately express gratitude, and in regard to the natural given both can at least express appreciation.Footnote ⁹ And often this will take the form of contemplation, understood as a kind of appreciative attention. Regarding contemplation, Josef Pieper writes:

Existential conservatism can thus be understood as a habitual disposition to appreciative attention or loving beholding of what is good in the given world, which ultimately requires assent to the world as a whole as being good in order to address adequately the problem of cosmodicy.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, this sort of disposition is important for any effort to make things better. As Edmund Burke remarks:

Existential conservatism is thus not a mere affirmation of the status quo (i.e. the existing state of affairs), but rather, it is a habitual disposition (i.e. life-orientation or existential stance) that seeks to find what is good in the status quo, and which in turn best enables one to improve the status quo where improvement is needed and desirable. However, the greatest significance of this existential stance is not how it best enables improvement (though this is certainly important), but rather how it enables us to address the problem of cosmodicy by showing how even in troubled times and amidst efforts to improve our condition we can still affirm that the given world as a whole is good and is a source of joy and fulfillment, which enables us to feel at home in the world rather than in a perpetual state of alienation.Footnote ¹³

With this account of existential conservatism in place, I want now to turn to explore how Scruton can be regarded as an existential conservative and how this is connected to his cultural and political conservatism.

Scruton's metaphysical conservatism

In his 2014 book How to Be a Conservative,Footnote ¹⁴ Scruton distinguishes between two kinds of conservatism. One he says is empirical and is a distinctly modern phenomenon, as it is a ‘reaction to the vast changes unleashed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment’ (viii). It is a specifically political form of conservatism, and he spends most of the book discussing it. The other kind of conservatism is metaphysical and he says it ‘resides in the belief in sacred things and the desire to defend them against desecration’ (viii). Scruton thinks that this belief is ‘exemplified at every point in history and will always be a powerful influence in human affairs’ (viii). He only discusses this form of conservatism towards the end of the book, but it plays a central role throughout his philosophical work, e.g. in his writings on religion, aesthetics, and ethics. Scruton's metaphysical conservatism, I believe, is a form of what I have called existential conservatism, and I want to try to bring out how this is the case.

To begin, we should ask: what are the ‘sacred things’ that are in need of defense? Something (e.g. a text, a work of art, a building, a place, a human being, etc.) is sacred if it is in some way set apart from other things in demanding an attitude of reverence and bringing with it requirements of inviolability. Belief in sacred things has traditionally been connected with a religious worldview, but in many places in the modern world such a worldview has been under threat and in decline. And with this there has arisen the threat of disenchantment, i.e. a loss of meaning or value that stands independent of our desires as that with which we ought to orient our lives. Scruton seeks a kind of re-enchantment that can recover and defend the experience of the sacred, especially through recovering and defending the experience of genuine beauty.

We see this in chapter 11 (‘Realms of Value’) of How to Be a Conservative, which is the chapter in which Scruton discusses his ‘metaphysical conservatism’ most extensively. There he puts forward the experience of beauty as a way of re-enchantment: ‘when we look on an object, be it a flower or a work of art, and see it as intrinsically worthy of our attention, we are in a measure recuperating the religious worldview, … however far we may be from any transcendental belief’ (153-4). The idea is that there can be something ‘set apart’ and reverence-worthy revealed here. Like religious belief, he says that the experience of beauty has come under threat in the modern world due to the ‘culture of desecration’ (or the ‘cult of transgression’). In the twentieth century, beauty came under suspicion and ‘[art] increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert or transgress moral certainties and it was not beauty but originality – however achieved and at whatever moral cost – that won the prizes’ (159). This culture of desecration is not the only challenge for a genuine encounter with beauty: there is also the ‘haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry’, as well as the disenchanting tendencies of modern science that encourage a disengaged viewpoint where the world is seen as bleached of all value-properties. Yet, Scruton says, ‘we all know what it is, suddenly to be transported by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation’ (162).

Here Scruton endorses a contemplative stance that is a form of what I have described as the existential stance of affirming and appreciating the given. He describes it as an attitude of ‘disinterested contemplation’ that is directed ‘towards our world in search of its meaning’: ‘When we take this attitude we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty’ (162). T. S. Eliot also expresses this attitude well, but in a more religious key, in ‘Little Gidding’ (the last of his Four Quartets; the title of which refers to a village retreat in Cambridgeshire established for prayer and worship):

What is particularly important about this contemplative stance – as previously discussed – is that it enables us to feel at home in the world (‘History is now and England’, as Eliot puts it), which is a chief aim of existential conservatism. Indeed, Scruton maintains that ‘our greatest need is for home’, and he says that we achieve the feeling of home ‘through representations of our own belonging’ (162).Footnote ¹⁶ And here the need for home connects up with the need for beauty:

Elsewhere Scruton also writes:

Scruton acknowledges that our being at home in the world is never perfectly realized, and hence  ‘the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world, to a “kingdom of ends” in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered’.Footnote ¹⁸ Here again we see Scruton recovering a religious frame of mind. But it is important to emphasize that even though some not-fully-at-home-ness may remain, we can be at home in the world in the sense that we affirm that the world as a whole is good and that we can find a meaningful place within it.

So how does all of this bear on Scruton's political conservatism? I think the basic disposition of existential conservatism that we find in Scruton, which seeks to discover, appreciate, affirm, and conserve what is good in the given world, plays itself out in the cultural-political given and results in conservative judgments. In particular, Scruton thinks that in Western civilization and especially in the English-speaking part of it ‘we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep’, such as: rule of law and equality before it; democratic government; a large space of freedom to live as we see fit; security of property and family life; civility and public spirit; a culture of open enquiry; institutions that promote peace and prosperity and protect the common good; and so on. We often take these things for granted but they are all under threat, and Scruton says that ‘conservatism is the rational response to that threat’. It starts from the sentiment that ‘good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created’, and that this is especially true of the collective assets just mentioned, which depend on cooperation with others to maintain them (viii-ix). What is especially important for maintaining these good things that we have inherited, according to Scruton's conservative viewpoint (influenced as it is by Burke and Hegel), is the recognition of non-contractual obligations:

Scruton goes on to summarize his conservatism as follows: ‘Conservatism is the philosophy of attachment. We are attached to the things we love, and wish to protect them against decay’ (29). In other words, we only seek to conserve because we love; if there were nothing worthy of love then there would be nothing worthy of conservation. At the most general level, that of existential conservatism, this means being orientated in love or appreciation for what is good in the given world and seeking to conserve (i.e. promote and protect) this good.

Although I am suggesting that Scruton's existential conservatism feeds into his political conservatism, there is no necessary connection between the two kinds of conservatism. It all depends on our judgments about the good and bad of our cultural-political givens.

Cohen's small-c conservatism

Perhaps the best illustration of the point that one does not need to be a political conservative in order to be an existential conservative is G. A. Cohen, who is well known for his work as a socialist political philosopher, including authoring, among other books, Why Not Socialism? Footnote ¹⁹ Towards the end of his life, he wrote an essay titled ‘Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value’.Footnote ²⁰ There he acknowledges (confesses?) that for decades he has ‘harbored strongly conservative, that is, strongly small-c conservative, opinions, on many matters that are not matters of justice’ (144). He distinguishes this small-c conservatism, which is a particular attitude concerned with conserving ‘existing value’, from large-C Conservatism, or political conservatism, which he thinks is committed to conserving injustice (144, 172-3). I will return in the next section to consider the relationship between existential conservatism and justice, but for now we need to consider in more detail Cohen's small-c conservatism.

The conservative disposition that Cohen endorses is one that he thinks every sane person has to some degree (at least in practice, even if not with full self-awareness), but the small-c conservative is someone who has a ‘sturdier form’ of it, which is to say, the conservative attitude receives greater emphasis in such a person and he or she has self-awareness with regard to this attitude (145, 150, 154).Footnote ²¹ This conservative attitude, Cohen says, ‘exhibits a bias in favor of retaining what is of value, even in the face of replacing it by something of greater value’ (149). He distinguishes between three aspects of this conservative attitude: (1) valuing and seeking to preserve that which is intrinsically valuable (i.e. ‘particular valuing’); (2) valuing and seeking to preserve that which is personally valued (i.e. ‘personal valuing’); and (3) ‘accepting the given’.

In the case of particular valuing, Cohen says, ‘a person values something as the particular valuable thing that it is, and not merely for the value that resides in it. … [Even] though the particular indeed gets its value, in the first instance, from the intrinsic value that it has, our valuing of it, the particular, is not merely a valuing of the intrinsic value that it has, but also a valuing of it, the particular itself’ (148). He speaks of valuing something here, but we can also speak of valuing and loving someone: e.g. a sweetheart or a friend. We don't simply love and value the beloved because of her intrinsically valuable qualities; we also love and value her for her own sake, as the particular person she is. If we found someone else who had similar or even certain better qualities we wouldn't say that this other person would do just as well or better. The beloved is irreplaceable. We can also say that a particular charming old building or a plot of land or a cultural way of life is irreplaceable. Cohen remarks: ‘we devalue the valuable things we have if we keep them only so long as nothing even slightly more valuable comes along. Valuable things command a certain loyalty. If an existing thing has intrinsic value, then we have reason to regret its destruction as such, a reason that we would not have if we cared only about the value that the thing carries or instantiates’ (153). Such a mindset, concerned as it is with the conservation of what has value and not merely with the conservation of value, is fundamentally opposed to a maximizing mindset that seeks to maximize value at the expense of valuable things, which are therefore regarded as dispensable.

In the case of personal valuing, Cohen states, ‘a person values something because of the special relation of the thing to that person’ (148), viz. because of the person's attachment to it. Such a mode of valuing is also resistant to the maximizing mindset. For instance, we can think of an attachment to a house: perhaps we could find what is in many respects a better house, but we do not want to move there because it would mean giving up our home, and here ‘home’ expresses our attachment to this particular house and our sense of belonging there. (Of course, sometimes the requirements of work or an expanding family may necessitate finding a new house, and perhaps it is even a better house in many respects, but still if a particular house is a home for us, then we would leave it mournfully.) We can say something similar about a particular plot of land, culture, town, country, friend, and so on. Cohen writes: ‘We are attached to particular things [or persons] because we need to belong to something [or someone], and we therefore need some things [or persons] to belong to us’ (168).Footnote ²² Although Cohen does not fill this point out in detail, we should add that such a need for belonging also takes an existential form in what I have described above as a need to be at home in the world. And this also connects up with the third aspect of Cohen's small-c conservatism: accepting the given.

With regard to accepting the given, Cohen writes, ‘some things must be accepted as given, … not everything can, or should, be shaped to our aims and requirements; the attitude that goes with seeking to shape everything to our requirements both violates intrinsic value and contradicts our own spiritual requirements. … [The] attitude of universal mastery over everything is repugnant, and, at the limit, insane’ (149). Cohen says the least about this aspect of small-c conservatism; he mostly sets it aside, ‘not because it is unimportant’ but because, as he puts it, ‘it is too deep to explore here’ (152). Indeed, he leaves some of the key claims in his remarks about it largely undeveloped. However, it is precisely this kind of conservatism – i.e. ‘existential conservatism’ – that I have been concerned to explore in this essay, though I have spoken about affirming and appreciating the given. Understood in this way, I think this aspect of Cohen's small-c conservatism can be regarded as the basis of the other two aspects as they can in fact be seen as expressions of an affirmative and appreciative stance towards the given, since the given includes the particular existing things that have value and our personal attachments.

We can also see this foundational role of affirming and appreciating the given at the beginning of the essay (in the ‘Hegelian prelude’) when Cohen says that in all three aspects of small-c conservatism ‘the subject is at peace with the object’, and he goes on to remark:

But the ‘Gethsemane idea’ here seems precisely to be a Christianized version of the accepting (i.e. affirming) and appreciating stance towards the given, which involves accepting the will of God and affirming the goodness of the world as it is (i.e. being ‘at peace with the world’ and therefore with ourselves) even in the face of hardship. And this general existential stance, I suggest, is important for any other form of being ‘at peace with the object’.

With these remarks in place, I want to try to fill out and defend two key claims of Cohen's that he leaves largely undeveloped: viz. (1) the claim that the failure to accept some things as given ‘contradicts our own spiritual requirements’; and (2) the claim that an ‘attitude of universal mastery over everything is repugnant, and, at the limit, insane’. I think providing a convincing defense of these two claims would demonstrate that everyone has a good reason to be an existential conservative, regardless of one's political perspective.

In regard to the first claim, Cohen does not explain what he has in mind when he speaks of our ‘spiritual requirements’, but I think one of our spiritual requirements is, paraphrasing Chesterton, to ‘[take] things with gratitude, and not [take] things for granted’. In other words, we need to appreciate properly ‘existing value’, i.e. what is good in the given world. And ultimately this is important for the spiritual requirement of coming to affirm the world as a whole and its sheer gratuitous goodness, which addresses the problem of cosmodicy: i.e. the problem of whether life in the world is worthwhile in the face of evil and suffering. We cannot accept everything in all aspects, since some things are evil and need to be corrected as far as possible; but some things must be accepted and appreciated as given, and ultimately we need to be able to see the world as a whole as good and worth affirming.

In regard to the second claim, we can say that ‘the attitude of universal mastery over everything is repugnant’ because it fails to recognize any proper limits set on our wills. Such recognition comes from rightly appreciating what is of value, and hence Cohen says that the attitude of universal mastery ‘violates intrinsic value’. Indeed, such an attitude, at the limit, is ‘insane’ because it courts nihilism. We see this in a passage from David Wiggins that Cohen quotes in a footnote, part of which is as follows: ‘if we are not ready to scrutinize with any hesitation or perplexity at all the conviction (as passionate as it is groundless, surely, for no larger conception is available that could validate it) that everything in the world is in principle ours or there for the taking; then what will befall us? Will a new disquiet assail our desires themselves, in a world no less denuded of meaning by our sense of our own omnipotence than ravaged by our self-righteous insatiability?’Footnote ²³ In other words, if everything is ‘up for grabs’ (or if we think that ‘the world's mine oyster’, as Pistol does in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor), i.e. if there are no ends of choice that are of great importance such that they can place constraints on our choices, then this deflates our sense of the importance of choice; we are left with a disenchanted view of the world and indeed ‘a new disquiet’ assails our desires: why desire anything? We see a similar point made by Michael Sandel in his critique of genetic engineering in The Case Against Perfection (which is also cited by Cohen in a footnote). Sandel writes: ‘The problem with eugenics and genetic engineering is that they represent the one-sided triumph of willfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding’.Footnote ²⁴ This undermines a key aspect of the best kind of parental love: viz. an accepting love that appreciates children as gifts rather than regarding them as products of our will. Sandel concludes his book with the following remarks: ‘There is something appealing, even intoxicating about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given. … But that vision of freedom is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will’.Footnote ²⁵ And we should add that when we have nothing to affirm or behold outside of our own will, then we have nothing to will. Therefore, if we are not to fall into such a debilitating condition, we must regard an affirmative and appreciative stance towards the given as being more fundamental than any choosing stance. In other words, an affirmative and appreciative stance towards what is of value in the given world provides the necessary background against which significant choices can be made.Footnote ²⁶

Sandel is in fact another good example of an existential conservative who is not a political conservative, though his left-wing communitarianism has a fair amount in common with Scruton's right-wing communitarianism (as I think it is fair to describe it).Footnote ²⁷ Like Scruton, he puts a strong emphasis on non-contractual obligations in his account of being an ‘encumbered self’ that recognizes the moral significance of unchosen ties to family, neighbours, fellow citizens, place, and traditions. But Sandel differs from Scruton in seeking to provide a communitarian basis for egalitarian distributive policies. Indeed, his main criticism of John Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism is that his ‘unencumbered’ (i.e. liberal individualist) conception of the self cannot support his ‘difference principle’, which requires equal distribution of economic benefits unless it can be shown that an unequal distribution is more beneficial to the least well off. Sandel writes: ‘What the difference principle requires, but cannot provide, is some way of identifying those among whom the assets I bear are properly regarded as common, some way of seeing ourselves as mutually indebted and morally engaged to begin with’.Footnote ²⁸

For Cohen, it is also because of a commitment to an egalitarian conception of justice that he distances himself from political conservatism and indeed regards it as conserving injustice. At this point we must turn to consider the relationship between existential conservatism and justice. I think existential conservatism does have implications for how we think about justice, and I want to suggest that it is at odds with Cohen's commitment to ‘luck egalitarianism’.

Conservatism, luck egalitarianism, and justice

In his essay ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Cohen expresses the basic idea of a ‘luck egalitarian’ conception of justice when he writes: ‘a large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the influence of brute luck on distribution … Brute luck is an enemy of just equality, and, since effects of genuine choice contrast with brute luck, genuine choice excuses otherwise unacceptable inequalities’.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, inequalities in society that result from brute luck (i.e. luck due to the contingencies of our natural and social circumstances) are unjust and should be redressed, whereas inequalities that result from genuine choice are not unjust and do not call for redress. Political conservatism conserves injustice, on Cohen's view, precisely because it does not seek to ‘extinguish the influence of brute luck on distribution’.

To fill out further the luck egalitarian position, consider its most famous and influential advocate: John Rawls. According to Rawls, ‘the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance’ are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ and should not be allowed to determine social and economic advantage.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, in order to come up with the fair terms of social cooperation – i.e. what Rawls regards as the principles of justice – we need to think of ourselves in the hypothetical scenario of the ‘original position’, where we adopt a ‘veil of ignorance’ such that we do not know the particularities of our social situation, our natural assets, and our comprehensive conception of the good for human life (10-11). This is supposed to ensure that our choice of the principles of justice is not biased by the contingencies of our natural and social circumstances. There are two general principles of justice that Rawls thinks we will arrive at here. First: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’. Second: ‘Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged … and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity’ (266). Part (a) of the second principle expresses the ‘difference principle’, which, as mentioned earlier, requires equal distribution of economic benefits unless it can be shown that an unequal distribution is more beneficial to the least well off. Rawls writes:

Rawls’ account of ‘justice as fairness’ represents a radical assault on the traditional common sense conception of justice as having to do with desert. Not only does he think that we don't deserve our natural capacities nor our favourable starting place in society (how could these be deserved?), he goes further than Cohen in denying desert for individual initiative and responsible choice when he writes: ‘Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances’ (64), and so, as he later says, ‘[the] notion of desert does not apply here’ (89; see also 273-4).

Robert Nozick aptly remarks: ‘This line of argument can succeed in blocking the introduction of a person's autonomous choices and actions (and their results) only by attributing everything noteworthy about a person completely to certain sorts of “external” factors. So denigrating a person's autonomy and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line to take for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the dignity and self-respect of autonomous beings’.Footnote ³¹ Nozick also takes issue with Rawls’ view that we should regard our natural assets as ‘common assets’. He turns Rawls’ own argument against utilitarianism against him and contends that he ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’.Footnote ³² Indeed, on the basis of the atomistic or unencumbered conception of the self that both Rawls and Nozick affirm it is not clear how the difference principle can avoid the charge of violating the Kantian principle that persons should not be used as a mere means to others’ ends. To recall Sandel's remarks cited above: ‘What the difference principle requires, but cannot provide, is some way of identifying those among whom the assets I bear are properly regarded as common, some way of seeing ourselves as mutually indebted and morally engaged to begin with’. Short of either a socially encumbered conception of the self in which we can regard the good of others as our own or a conception of desert by which we can be said to be morally obligated to help those who are less fortunate, it is not clear that our own assets should be regarded as, in some sense, common assets.

What I want to focus on, however, is the attitude towards contingency, or ‘the given’, in luck egalitarianism. We have seen that Rawls regards the contingencies of our natural and social circumstances as ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’. But is this right? I don't think so. For one thing, these contingencies of natural and social circumstance shape our very character as ‘encumbered selves’ and give our lives a ‘moral depth’.Footnote ³³ As George Sher says, ‘the innumerable contingencies that differentiate each person's situation from those of others’ are not simply ‘so many sources of unjust inequality to be neutralized by society’, but rather they are ‘the backdrop in whose absence we could not live recognizably human lives at all’.Footnote ³⁴ Furthermore, David Wiggins writes in response to Rawls’ attempt to ‘remove the “undeserved” or “moral arbitrary” contingencies of natural gifts and fortunate circumstances’: ‘Even behind the veil of ignorance, the deliberators might easily see the disadvantage of insisting on the “moral arbitrariness” of such blessings—if insisting on it will have the effect of subverting the message of Jesus’ parable of the talents, namely one's paramount moral duty to make something (and not just for oneself) of what gifts one has (Matthew 25: 14–30). Contingency is not the same as arbitrariness’.Footnote ³⁵ In short, the contingencies of our natural and social circumstances are morally charged.

In an arresting phrase, Wiggins describes Rawls as waging ‘a metaphysical crusade against contingency’,Footnote ³⁶ i.e. against the given, and I think the same can be said of other luck egalitarians, including Cohen. And thus Cohen's luck egalitarianism stands at odds with his existential conservatism, which is supposed to encourage an accepting and appreciating stance towards the given (though not disallowing reform). In ‘Rescuing Conservatism’, Cohen does acknowledge some tension between his conception of justice and his small-c conservatism, though he maintains: ‘you can be both egalitarian and conservative by putting justice lexically prior to (other) value’, i.e. by giving justice precedence over other values when they come into conflict. However, he also says: ‘I do not say that I am myself so uncompromising an egalitarian, so lexically projustice. I am not sure that we should regret the production of all the wonderful material culture that we have inherited and that was produced at the expense of gross injustice’ (172). In ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, he writes: ‘if priority were always given to relieving misery, then no resources could be devoted to maintaining cathedrals and other creations of inestimable value’. He thinks this is a powerful objection, but says it ‘does not challenge the claim that, to the extent that equalization is defensible, welfare is the right thing to equalize’ (910-11). But ‘relieving misery’ is not the same thing as equalizing welfare, and if our concern is with the former rather than the latter (and I will suggest below that it should be), then there is no inherent tension with promoting high culture (e.g. in building and maintaining cathedrals, art museums, private universities, etc.). Moreover, the aim of relieving misery is fully compatible with existential conservatism, whereas luck egalitarianism is not because of its ‘metaphysical crusade against contingency’, and this is a point that Cohen does not seem to appreciate. Luck egalitarianism encourages a continual disappointment with and repudiation of the given world. It gives emphasis to indignation rather than gratitude for or appreciation of the given, and indeed its focus on what it regards as the wrong of economic inequality encourages constant comparison, which can lead to feelings of discontent, regret, resentment, and envy that are opposed to the disposition of gratitude.Footnote ³⁷ Such comparison with others also distracts us from concern for what really matters for one's own life.Footnote ³⁸ And yet we find Ronald Dworkin – another prominent luck egalitarian – putting forward an ‘envy test’ as a criterion of justice in distribution, writing: ‘No division of resources is an equal division if, once the division is complete, [a person] would prefer someone's bundle of resources to his own bundle’.Footnote ³⁹ We know something has gone drastically wrong when a vice has been elevated into a standard of justice.Footnote ⁴⁰ It should also be noted that luck egalitarians have supported genetic engineering and have in fact seen it as a matter of justice, which perhaps most clearly expresses their ‘metaphysical crusade against contingency’.Footnote ⁴¹ Cohen is opposed to genetic engineering on the basis of his existential conservatism, but again here we see a conflict with his luck egalitarianism.

I think in the conflict between existential conservatism and luck egalitarianism we should side with the former over the latter. This is both because of what I have argued is the spiritual importance of existential conservatism for addressing the problem of cosmodicy and because luck egalitarianism is not a compelling account of justice. I think we do better to preserve the traditional common sense notion of justice as having to do with desert, where people are thought to be deserving of certain consideration and treatment in virtue of their humanity (in light of a view of human dignity), in virtue of the choices they make and the person they become, and in virtue of their membership in a political community. And what deserves our special consideration is dire human need. In regard to responding to contingencies of natural and social circumstance, Wiggins writes that the key issue can be stated as follows:   

With respect to economic justice, I contend, we should be sufficientarians rather than egalitarians (if we must use ugly words). This means that what matters from the standpoint of justice is, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, ‘not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough’,Footnote ⁴³ where what counts as ‘enough’, on my view, is that each person can live and live well in a characteristically human mode of life, and where relieving misery, i.e. meeting dire human need, is of paramount importance.Footnote ⁴⁴ The specific means we take to ensure that people have enough will be a matter of prudential judgment, though it seems that it should involve some combination of law-governed markets, government assistance, and private charity.

Leaving aside these details (which take us beyond the scope of this essay), what I want to emphasize is that this sufficientarian conception of economic justice, unlike luck egalitarianism, fits with existential conservatism, given it first of all seeks to cherish, preserve, and foster the gift (or given good) of human life. Secondly, it also seeks to preserve the given good of the social bond. Instead of engaging in ‘a metaphysical crusade against contingency’, we should, as Wiggins says, ‘embark on the simpler and altogether more positive alternative project of engaging all citizens as fully as possible, in as many ways as possible, but each in the way best suited to their own aptitudes and predispositions, with the shared thing in which they all participate, and of removing some of the greatest obstacles to this’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Scruton in fact holds a similar view. He maintains that a well-functioning political society depends upon a strong sense of ‘we’, i.e. a first-person plural, and he writes: ‘No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny. … A believable conservatism has to suggest ways of spreading the benefit of social membership to those who have not succeeded in gaining it for themselves’. Scruton goes on to say: ‘the more we take from this arrangement, the more we must give in return. This is not a contractual obligation. It is an obligation of gratitude’.Footnote ⁴⁶ We might also speak here of ‘obligations of piety’, as we saw Scruton do earlier and which he says ‘stem from the natural gratitude towards what is given’. But piety not only involves gratitude; it can also be seen as synonymous with reverence. Piety requires us to show reverence for that which is reverence-worthy, including human life and the sources of our existence. And thus it is also important for motivating our concern for those in need.

Although existential conservatism is underdetermined with regard to many of the particulars of political life, as it leaves much of this to the difficult work of prudential judgment, it nevertheless cultivates an existential stance that emphasizes gratitude or appreciation for the given. And this, I suggest, provides a much sounder basis for our political life than the common alternatives of indignation, resentment, envy, greed, and lust for power. We do better to begin by counting our blessings and work the rest out from there.Footnote ⁴⁷