Reclaiming Equity Through Consequentialism's Lens — Epoche C1
A child in a remote Andean village may hold a constitutional right to free primary education and still have no school within a day's walk. That gap — between a right formally held and a right that can be exercised — is the concrete problem this essay is about, and it is the standing objection brought against theories of justice that specify rights first and outcomes afterwards. The most influential such theory is John Rawls's, set out in A Theory of Justice (1971), and the objection is most sharply pressed by Amartya Sen's capability approach. The argument below is that the objection succeeds, but not for the reason usually given; that the reason usually given, including in the compressed version of this essay, rests on a misreading of Rawls that has to be corrected before anything else can be said; and that what remains is a genuine and consequential disagreement about what should be measured. What Rawls proposed, and why the standard complaint misses it The complaint to be assessed is that Rawlsian justice establishes rights in the abstract and offers no mechanism for the material conditions of exercising them. To see why that is wrong, the theory has to be stated with its second half attached, which popular summaries usually omit. Rawls's method is a thought experiment. Parties choosing the basic principles of their society do so behind a veil of ignorance : they know general facts about economics and psychology but not their own class, talents, sex, race or conception of the good. Not knowing which position they will occupy, they cannot rig the principles in their own favour, and Rawls argues they would choose two, in strict order of priority: Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with the same scheme for all. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity; and they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society — the difference principle . The difference principle is not a side note. It is a maximin criterion applied to social and economic arrangements: among the available institutional schemes, choose the one under which the worst-off group does best. And the currency in which "best" is assessed is Rawls's index of primary goods — things any rational person is presumed to want whatever else they want — which explicitly includes income and wealth, powers and prerogatives of office, and the social bases of self-respect, alongside rights and liberties. A theory whose second principle is a distributive requirement over income, wealth and office cannot fairly be described as indifferent to resources. The original version of this essay illustrated its charge with the case of a voter who must walk for days to reach a polling station, or who cannot read the ballot: the formal right, it said, offers little practical freedom. The illustration is well chosen and the attribution is wrong. Rawls addresses precisely this in A Theory of Justice under the heading of the fair value of the political liberties (§36): a merely formal equal right to participate is insufficient, and the worth of the political liberties must be made approximately equal for all citizens, by public measures if necessary. Rawls confines this guarantee of worth to the political liberties and does not extend it to the liberties generally — that restriction is a real and contestable feature of his view — but on the specific example chosen, the objection is one he raised against himself. The objection that does bite: conversion Sen's actual objection is narrower than "Rawls ignores material conditions" and considerably harder to answer. He put it in his 1979 Tanner Lecture, "Equality of What?", published the following year. Every egalitarian theory, Sen observes, must answer the question of the title: equality of what ? Rawls answers: of an index of primary goods. Sen's reply is that primary goods are means, and that people differ systematically in the rate at which they convert means into the ends that actually matter. Two terms carry this. A functioning is an achieved doing or being — being adequately nourished, being literate, moving about freely, appearing in public without shame. A capability is the set of alternative combinations of functionings a person can actually achieve; it is a freedom, not an achievement, and a person who fasts and a person who starves have the same functioning and radically different capabilities. Sen develops both terms at length in Development as Freedom (1999). The conversion point can now be stated exactly. Two people with identical bundles of primary goods may command entirely different capability sets, because the conversion depends on personal characteristics (a metabolic disorder, a mobility impairment, pregnancy), on the physical environment (altitude, distance, endemic parasitic disease) and on the social environment (whether a woman may travel alone, whether a language is used in official business). The disability example the original essay offered is exactly right: equal income leaves a person needing costly assistive equipment with strictly less freedom, and the deficit is invisible to any index that counts income. So too the Andean child. What has failed there is not primarily the possession of a right, nor even household income; it is the conversion of income and entitlement into the functioning of being educated, obstructed by distance, by language of instruction, and by the opportunity cost of a child's labour. An index of primary goods records none of these. Rawls's reply, which is not empty It would be too quick to treat the conversion argument as decisive, because Rawls answered it directly, in "Social Unity and Primary Goods" (1982), and his answer identifies a real cost in Sen's proposal. Rawls's defence has two parts. The first is a division of responsibility: a political conception