T. M. Scanlon takes his titular question seriously. Synthesizing and developing his influential previous work on inequality, he aims here to give a systematic, robust, and genuinely informative explanation of how inequalities can be morally objectionable. Because it has this ambitious aim, this short book is subtly and densely argued. After proposing a general framework for explaining how there can be distinctively egalitarian moral reason to object to inequalities (ch. 1), Scanlon draws on this framework to argue that there are six such reasons to object to inequalities (chs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9) and that these reasons are not undermined or outweighed by apparently competing considerations of liberty or desert (chs. 7 and 8). Taken together, these six reasons constitute Scanlon's explanation why inequalities are morally objectionable. After reviewing Scanlon's arguments, I'll suggest some reasons to doubt that the explanation on offer – although powerful and persuasive so far as it goes – could be a complete one.
Inequalities are ‘difference[s] between what some have and what others have’ (p. 1). These could be differences in many kinds of holding – for example, resources, social status, opportunities, or welfare. Scanlon's six reasons to object to inequalities fall into two categories. Some inequalities are objectionable because of their causal upshot. Others are objectionable because of their causal history. In either case, in order for the reason to object to the inequality to qualify as a distinctively egalitarian one, it must be that (a) the inequality itself is (b) appropriately causally related to (c) some morally relevant factor that is itself comparative in nature (p. 2). (Scanlon does not seem to give a canonical characterization of what it is for a morally relevant factor to be comparative in nature. Broadly, the idea is that the factor essentially involves some comparison of the lives or interests of different persons (p. 21).)
Before turning to some examples, it is worth noting some features of the general explanatory schema above. The requirement (c) – that the explanans be itself comparative in nature – gives Scanlon's explanation a distinctively egalitarian character, distinguishing it from the view that inequality is merely instrumentally bad. And the requirements (a) and (b) – that it be the inequality in question, itself, that stands in the appropriate causal relation to the explanans – guarantee that it is the inequality itself (and not some nearby fact, such as some being badly off) to which there is reason to object. This schema, in other words, sets the bar for explanatory success high. At the outset of investigation, it is not at all obvious that any inequality is morally objectionable on comparative grounds. Indeed, the interest of Scanlon's explanatory project – and what such an explanation is designed to defuse – is precisely the skeptical suspicion that concerns about inequality are misplaced concerns to ‘[maintain] an arbitrary pattern of distribution’ best explained as mere ‘expressions of envy’ (p. 2). When the schema above can be filled in, this skeptical suspicion is silenced by a positive, informative, and distinctively egalitarian account of the basis of a concern about inequality.
What, then, are the distinctively egalitarian moral reasons to object to inequalities? Of those inequalities that are objectionable because of their causal upshot, they are either objectionable because:
(i) they cause some to be ‘treated as inferior to others in a demeaning way’ (p. 5);
(ii) they cause some to have ‘an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others’ (p. 5);
(iii) they ‘make it difficult or impossible to achieve equality of economic opportunity’ (p. 6); or
(iv) they cause the ‘undermin[ing] of the fairness of political institutions’ (p. 6).
Of those inequalities that are objectionable because of their causal history, they are either objectionable because:
(v) they are the result of a failure to discharge a duty to show equal concern (p. 7); or
(vi) the economic institutions that give rise to them are unfair (p. 8).
This may at first seem a somewhat disconnected heap of reasons. But Scanlon's view can be recharacterized such that it displays an attractive unity. We begin with the question of whether some inequality-producing institution shall be part of the basic structure of our scheme of social cooperation, and we ask how the inequality that it would produce could be justified. Only a ‘three-level response’ (p. 40), Scanlon suggests, could supply such a justification:
• (Institutional Justification) The institution in question must itself be justified on some independent ground; and
• (Procedural Fairness) In sorting people into the roles that produce the inequality, the institution must use selection criteria that are ‘rationally related’ to whatever is the ground that justifies the institution itself; and
• (Substantive Opportunity) People who are not qualified by the lights of the relevant selection criteria must not lack these qualifications in virtue of having been wronged (pp. 40–42).
If this is how inequalities can be morally justified, inequalities are morally objectionable, then, when they are either the cause of, or the causal upshot of, some institution failing to satisfy one or more of these conditions. Now reconsider the six reasons above in light of this three-level justification:
• (iii) is an instance of inequality causing economic institutions to fail to satisfy Procedural Fairness or Substantive Opportunity, and (iv) is an instance of inequality causing political institutions to fail to satisfy Procedural Fairness;
• (v) is an instance of inequality that results from political institutions failing to satisfy Institutional Justification or Procedural Fairness, and (vi) is an instance of inequality that results from economic institutions failing to satisfy Institutional Justification; and
• (i) and (ii) might be characterized as ways in which inequalities cause our basic political institutions to fail to satisfy Institutional Justification (if we take those institutions to be justified by the goods associated with the citizenship role that they define, and take inequalities of status and control to be incompatible with those goods).
Under this recharacterization, a common thread unites Scanlon's six reasons to object to inequality. Each one corresponds to a failure of the three-level justification; that is, each marks a different way in which our social relations can fail to meet an egalitarian standard.
Scanlon's broad picture, then, is one on which inequality is analogous to a sharp-edged tool. It is not in itself objectionable, and we can have perfectly good reasons to have it in our society when the three-level justification for it is available. Nevertheless it is something over which we have reason to keep a tight rein and a watchful eye. When produced by institutions that violate the three-level justification, it is objectionable. And – somewhat ironically – it tends to undermine the very conditions that are necessary for the institutions that give rise to it to be justified.
Considering two examples in more detail will help to illustrate further the character of the explanation. Consider, first, the case of higher educational institutions. Economic inequality can cause these institutions to fail to satisfy Procedural Fairness. For example, economic inequality puts wealthier parents in a position to procure education-related skills for their children via exclusive ‘enrichment programs’ (p. 69). But often the skills that such programs provide could easily be taught by colleges themselves. If so, then colleges that select partly on the basis of such criteria in their admissions processes (as many now do) use selection criteria that are not appropriately related to the justification for higher educational institutions. So the existence of economic inequality can make it the case that colleges violate Procedural Fairness. This example also illustrates a further important aspect of Scanlon's view. Whether some attribute of persons counts as a ‘talent’ – that is, something that is a legitimate basis on which to select candidates for some institutional position – depends on the justification for that institution. An institution can permissibly count some attribute as a talent only if it is both appropriately related to the good the production of which justifies the institution's existence and there is no permissible alternative way of organizing the institution that severs the relation between this attribute and the good in question. In that sense, talent is deeply institution-dependent (pp. 44–46, 57–59). The upshot, as the example above illustrates, is that Procedural Fairness has real bite in generating objections to inequalities. Procedural Fairness also gains bite in another way. In some cases, people can have reasons to want their candidacy assessed on their individual merits and not on the basis of (even accurate) proxies for those merits. Using such proxies as selection criteria would not then satisfy Procedural Fairness; doing so would not balance persons’ interests fairly (p. 51). As this example also illustrates, in assessing the inequalities generated by some institution, Scanlon's fundamental test is a comparison of people's reasons for wanting or caring about things – the test being whether, based on such reasons, there is anyone who could reasonably reject an institution that produces the inequality in question. (This background contractualist view about how interests are fairly balanced is a further respect in which Scanlon's explanation has an egalitarian character (pp. 21, 158).)
Consider, second, the case of economic inequality that arises from economic institutions that fail to satisfy Institutional Justification. The justification for an inequality-producing institution is the institution's necessity for some important good – for example, protecting a liberty that people have reason to want or providing some significant benefit to all. (It is worth noting, parenthetically, an important exception. The source of political institutions’ justification is not only their necessity for the production of important goods. In chapter 6, Scanlon argues that, as a result, there are some interesting further restrictions on the selection criteria to which these institutions can permissibly have regard.) But in the case of the economic institutions that permit the degree of wealth inequality now found in the United States, Scanlon suggests, there is no such connection; such a massive degree of inequality is not necessary for anyone to enjoy some morally significant good. So the worse off do not have sufficient reason to accept the economic inequality produced by such economic institutions. So these economic institutions fail to satisfy Institutional Justification. So these wealth inequalities – the metaphorical fruit of this poisoned institutional tree – are objectionable, in part, because they have arisen from economic institutions that lacked justification in the first place.
These two examples illustrate the operation of the three-level justification in the case of educational and economic institutions. But the three-level justification applies to any social institution. And many intuitively objectionable inequalities are similarly connected to failures of other social institutions to satisfy Institutional Justification, Procedural Fairness, or Substantive Opportunity. So Scanlon's view has the resources to accommodate and explain a wide variety of intuitively plausible judgments about inequality.
Few egalitarians will object to Scanlon's claims that inequalities can be objectionable in the ways just rehearsed. And most egalitarians will find much to learn from the care Scanlon takes over the detail of his explanation – in particular, the attention he gives to the empirical question of whether inequalities do in fact stand in the relevant causal relations and to the normative question of whether the factors to which they are causally related are in fact comparative in nature. But it is questionable whether Scanlon's is a complete explanation why inequality matters. Here is the heart of the concern. If inequality is not in itself morally objectionable, then it is puzzling why its arising in certain ways could be objectionable. Analogously, suppose some action of mine is wrong (for some reason independent of its results) and that it results both in your interests being set back and in an additional proton in some room. It could be that I would then have reason to remedy my action's effect on how your life went. But I would have no reason to remove the additional proton: q's being the effect of a wrongful action could make q morally objectionable only if q itself rises to the level of moral significance. So, in order for Scanlon's explanation to succeed, we need some reason to think that inequality, although not in itself morally objectionable, is unlike the additional proton in this toy case.
In reply, Scanlon might appeal to the other half of his explanation. Unlike single additional protons, inequalities have morally objectionable causal upshots. But this reply would not be enough. Imagine that the wealthy could be made extraordinarily good at converting their wealth into purely private hedonic experiences, which stipulatively lack the usual causal upshot of wealth inequalities. If the only explanation why the inequality produced by unjustified institutions is morally significant were the further causal upshot of that inequality, then making the wealthy better converters of resources into hedonic experiences would apparently eliminate egalitarian reasons to object to this kind of inequality. But surely the wealthy could not so easily escape the egalitarian demands that social relationships impose on them. Moreover, the present concern threatens, too, this other half of Scanlon's explanation. If inequality is not in itself morally objectionable, and if the three-level justification for its presence is undermined, that seems to return us to the starting point of its not being objectionable. (You might ask me to justify my proposed action of adding a proton to the room. If I say that doing so will make you happier, but this turns out not to be so, then I lack a good reason for adding the proton. But this does not give you any obvious basis for objecting if I go ahead and do it anyway. Mutatis mutandis, the same seems to apply to the putative reasons to object to inequalities in virtue of their causing a three-level justification for inequality to be undermined.)
A more promising reply to the concern would instead look causally upstream of the inequality in question. Sometimes, the causal history of something that is in itself morally unobjectionable supplies a straightforward explanation of how it could be morally significant. Suppose I promise to you not to add a proton to the room. Then, even if the number of protons in the room is in itself morally neutral, you arguably have a moral reason to object to my adding one. In the special case of a duty of equal concern, something similar is true of some inequalities; not bringing about certain inequalities is, in effect, the content of the duty. But can this idea be generalized beyond the special case where (there is independent reason to believe that) such a duty exists? In several passages in chapter 9, Scanlon seems to suggest an account along these lines. Consider again the important case in which massive wealth inequality is supposed to be objectionable because it results from economic institutions that do not satisfy Institutional Justification. Why is this inequality morally significant? Scanlon writes that people have claims as members of a cooperative scheme (p. 136) that allows ‘forms of interaction through which material benefits are produced’ (p. 141), and they have these claims because of the important ways in which their ‘lives depend on’ (p. 139) this scheme. In virtue of their each having such a claim and the fact that ‘it matters who enjoys these benefits’ (p. 141), the interest of each in having a ‘larger share of resources’ (p. 139) matters and must be fairly balanced. There is fair balancing of these claims only if there are only those inequalities ‘that are required in order for the economic system to function in a way that benefits all’ (p. 141). Allowing institutions to define roles that produce inequalities that do not meet this condition would be to allow some to enjoy benefits ‘in ways that others have no reason to accept’ (p. 141). The upshot – structurally similar to the promising case above – is that certain inequalities are what it is for Institutional Justification to fail to be satisfied.
These suggestive remarks are intriguing. But one might question whether, as they stand, they are enough to pull the rabbit of inequality's moral significance from the hat of its intrinsic non-objectionableness. Here are three reasons for concern. First, it is hard to see why, if inequality is in itself unobjectionable, it should be a determinant of whether opposing interests have been fairly balanced. Second, even if some distributive fact is relevant to whether interests have been fairly balanced, it could instead be that all having enough, or some priority having been given to the interests of those who start worse off, is the relevant fact. It is obscure why it should be inequality, in particular, that is the determinant of (and so the morally objectionable upshot of the failure of) Institutional Justification. Third, supposing that these two hurdles could be overcome, it is hard to see how the resulting explanation could plausibly be limited in such a way that inequality is morally objectionable only in the particular case in which it arises within cooperative schemes. People have an interest in having a larger share of benefits, and it matters who enjoys the benefits that there are, whether or not those benefits are the output of a cooperative scheme of which they are a part.
These critical comments should not be taken to detract from the book's importance. In its rich and subtle discussion of the variety of ways in which real-world inequality can be of moral concern, it is of significant practical interest. In showing the attractions and limits of an egalitarian view that takes seriously the challenge of explaining why inequality matters, it is of significant theoretical interest. Those who are egalitarians in a more robust sense – believing that some inequalities are morally objectionable but not only because of the causal relations in which they stand – should face up to that explanatory challenge in the admirably forthright way that Scanlon does. If they cannot support their beliefs with an explanation that is at least as plausible and informative as this one, then Scanlon's may on balance be the view that best accommodates and explains the judgment that inequality matters.
