The preference for personal enhancement - perfectionism or fairness?
A response to Jonathan Wolff

By Stuart White

I substantially agree with a lot of the claims Jonathan Wolff makes in The Message of Redistribution, and I think the framework for analysing redistribution that it presents is very helpful (and original). I entirely concur with the general thrust of the paper in trying to free up egalitarian thinking to acknowledge the various ways of addressing disadvantage, rather than trying to squeeze everything into the "compensation paradigm". My comments focus on the main points of disagreement I have with the paper, but they should be read against this background.

Jo Wolff identifies four ways in which we might try to address a disadvantage that someone suffers: compensation, personal enhancement, targeted resource enhancement, and status enhancement. All the strategies have potential problems, he argues, and the choice we make between them will reflect different underlying views about the nature of the human good - that is, what contemporary philosophers call "perfectionist" views. With respect to personal enhancement strategies in particular, Jo Wolff argues that these may be particularly problematic because of the extent to which they rest on strong perfectionist claims about the good life, claims that are controversial and may even be "deeply insulting". He gives as examples of personal enhancement policies that may be subject to this criticism, reskilling policies, asset-based welfare, and welfare-to-work.

I agree that perfectionism might provide a rationale for policies of these kinds and for personal enhancement strategies more generally. But I am not sure that the rationale for such policies, or personal enhancement approaches more generally, need be perfectionist. In addition to the efficiency consideration that Jo Wolff acknowledges, are there not also some arguments for preferring such approaches which appeal to ideas of fairness, and what best promotes fairness, rather than to strong perfectionist claims about the nature of the human good? I will give just one example of such an argument here.

At one point, Jo Wolff writes of welfare-to-work policies:

"If it all comes down to the same amount of money required to life someone out of poverty, in what sense is money earned through work 'better'?... there must be some kind of "work ethic" that is making the difference here. Work, according to this view, is good for you..."

Here I think Jo Wolff misses a non-perfectionist, fairness-based rationale for addressing disadvantage through a personal enhancement policy. This appeals to the idea that, as a matter of fairness, we have an obligation to make a decent productive contribution to the community (given that we are going to share in the social product) and, derivatively, a duty to develop the talent and skills necessary to make such a contribution. This is a "work ethic", but the idea underpinning the work ethic is not a claim about the good life, but a claim about fairness to others. Consider an analogy: in a (just) war one might think that everyone should do their bit and contribute to the struggle not because one thinks that fighting a war is a part of the good life, but because one thinks that it would be unfair for some to free-ride on the efforts of others. Some people - including a lot of thinkers in the socialist tradition (and, I think, some liberal egalitarians such as John Rawls) - have a similar intuition about economic life: each should make a contribution, through work, because it is unfair to free-ride on the labours of one's fellows.

Of course, one might challenge the claim that there is a duty to work as a matter of fairness towards one's fellow citizens. I don't doubt that this claim is "controversial". But the controversy is not, I think, about the content of the good life, but about what is fair.

Thus, I think the paper may overstate the extent to which a preference for personal enhancement policies tends to reflect controversial views about the content of the good life, rather than disagreement about the nature of fairness or justice.

This general thought takes more concrete shape in considering what Jo Wolff says about how we might address the disadvantage resulting from illiteracy. He does not doubt that, at the end of the day, the policy response will be a personal enhancement strategy - giving people the "means to literacy". But he has some ambivalence about this policy. What if, he asks, the illiterate endorse illiteracy as part of their lifestyle and would prefer a strategy of "status enhancement" in which their disadvantage is combated by reshaping society so as to remove the burdens associated with illiteracy? According to Jo Wolff, it is not "appealing" to "label these people as unreasonable". At the end of the day, they have their conception of the good, which places little or no value on literacy, and, on Jo Wolff's view, we ought not to judge that this conception of the good is any less reasonable than that of someone who does value literacy. To do so is to veer into undesirably strong perfectionist terrain.

I am not at all convinced by this argument. I think we can and should make the judgement that the "comfortably illiterate" (those who endorse illiteracy as part of their conception of the good) are "unreasonable". But I am not sure we need to base such a judgement on a perfectionist theory of the good life. Once again, to echo the general point made above, I think we can base such a judgement on considerations of fairness, as distinct from a theory of the good life. Becoming literate is a civic responsibility, I think, associated with fair and respectful treatment of one's fellow citizens.

Why might one think this? Firstly, one might think this because one accepts the principle of economic reciprocity which I discussed above. If one accepts that there is, as a matter of justice, a duty to make a decent productive contribution to the community then one might argue that, related to this duty, there is a duty to make a reasonable effort to develop the capacity to make a productive contribution. One has a duty to make some effort to make oneself the kind of person who can make a decent productive contribution to the community (where a "decent" level of contribution should bear some relation to what is possible given the natural endowments over which one has no control). And that, one might think, amounts to a duty to make a good faith effort to develop various basic productively-applicable skills and disciplines, including literacy. The refusal to make such an effort is a kind of free-riding - at least (and this is a point I shall expand on below) insofar as the illiterate are happy to make use of the range of goods and services that exist only because others have made the effort to become literate.

Secondly, one might relate the duty to become literate to the value of equality of opportunity (understood either in a meritocratic sense, or in one of the supermeritocratic senses we find in the work of Ronald Dworkin or G.A. Cohen). Most of us would agree that this value places the state and citizenry at large under duties to provide educational opportunities to all children, so that they have equal opportunity to develop their respective natural abilities. But one need not think the duties related to this public value rest only with the state and the citizenry at large. For example, one might think that parents also have a duty to cooperate with the community's efforts to educate their children so as to help ensure their children do not enter adult life with very limited skills, putting them at a great disadvantage relative to others. One might carry the argument further. Perhaps the duties related to the value of equal opportunity also apply to the children themselves. The thought here is that, beyond a certain age, children may have a duty, related to the value of equal opportunity, to make the educational effort necessary to prevent themselves entering adult life without skills and capacities that most others will have. Equality of opportunity is not, on the sort of view I am describing, simply something that "society" owes to the "individual", but something that is achieved, or at least approximated, through a combination of good faith, cooperative efforts by "society" and the "individual". It is unreasonable, on this view, to refuse this kind of cooperation because one endorses a lifestyle that does not value literacy (or even positively values illiteracy).

A third argument to this effect might be made by appealing to the value of democracy, and, more specifically, to the importance of deliberation to democratic citizenship. If one has a share, through the franchise, in state authority, and so in determining policy in ways that could affect the lives of other citizens, one surely has a responsibility to make a reasoned and informed judgement about which policies should be adopted. It is, for example, appalling to cast a vote on the basis of prejudice, ignorance, or whim when the consequences could be to elect a government that, say, sends some citizens to their death in an ill-considered (but initially popular) war. But how can one make a reasoned and informed judgment about policy if one is illiterate? It is surely a lot harder to do so. To endorse a lifestyle of which illiteracy is a part seems, once again, to involve a failure of responsible concern for one's fellow citizens.

Now it might be said in reply to all three of these arguments that they miss the key point that lies behind the idea of "status enhancement". The "comfortably illiterate" might say to us: "Of course we accept the duty to make a decent productive contribution, the value of equal opportunity, and the duty to make properly informed and reasoned judgements about public policy. What we object to is having to become literate in order to meet these duties and respect these values. We want a world in which we can do these things without sacrificing the illiteracy that we are comfortable with as part of our lifestyle and identity."

But if this the reply the illiterate make, then we are entitled to ask what kind of world it could be in which these important civic responsibilities could be discharged without the need for literacy and, in addition, whether the "comfortably illiterate" really do endorse that kind of world and the kind of life it would entail. So far as I can see, the kind of world in which these important civic responsibilities could be discharged without a need for literacy on the part of most people would be the simple small-group-of-peasants-gathered-under-a-tree world that Rousseau describes at one point in The Social Contract. If the "comfortably illiterate" value their illiteracy so much that they would prefer to live in that kind of world to living in the kind of world made possible by mass literacy, then perhaps the reply we are considering has some force. But if they value the huge gains in productivity and technology that are associated with the transition from the Rousseau-peasant world to modernity, then I think their reply has no force whatsoever. They are then demanding the right to benefit from mass literacy without accepting the implications of this for what they must do to meet their own civic responsibilities.

We could, of course, make a stronger argument. We could say that regardless of what the "comfortably illiterate" really think, the world of mass literacy is just objectively better than the Rousseau-peasant world. (Something of the residual Marxist in me makes me extremely sympathetic to such a rejection of "rural idiocy"!) And in this case, a perfectionist judgement certainly would be entering into the overall argument as to why there is a civic responsibility to become literate. But, given what I said in the previous paragraph, I don't think that we necessarily have to make such a perfectionist judgement in order to make the case for there being a civic responsibility to become literate. And even if we do make such a judgement (as, at the end of the day, I think we should), I think it is important even then to recognise that the case for the unreasonableness of the "comfortably illiterate" would, or could, rest as much on considerations of fairness as on a perfectionist judgement. Even with the perfectionist judgement that literate modernity is better overall than the Rousseau-peasant world, one need not conclude that each citizen has a duty to become literate. To reach that judgement one needs to supplement the perfectionist judgement about the relative worth of different types of society with some claims about fairness.

Thus, even when a preference for personal enhancement policies does in part reflect a particular judgement about the human good, it may also reflect views about fairness that are distinct from these perfectionist judgements. It is the conjunction of the two that gives us the preference for personal enhancement policies, not (necessarily) just the perfectionist judgement alone.

Stuart White is Lecturer in Politics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a member of Catalyst's National Council. "The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship" is published this year by Oxford University Press.

To read PDF documents you will need Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you do not have a copy you can download it free from Adobe.


Articles list