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Equal Opportunity and Genetic Intervention*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

Allen Buchanan
Allen Buchanan
Affiliation:
Business Ethics, Philosophy, and Medical Ethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

What does the prospect of being able to alter a human being's “natural assets” by genetic engineering imply for our understanding of the requirements of justice, and of equal opportunity in particular? Although their proponents are reluctant to admit it, some of the most prominent contemporary theories of justice yield a quite radical conclusion: If safe and effective intervention in the genetic “natural lottery” becomes feasible, there will be at least a strong prima facie case for doing so in the name of equality of opportunity (or of some other egalitarian principle of justice, such as the principle that persons are entitled to equal concern and respect), if this is the most effective way to meet the demands of justice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 105 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1995

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References

1 Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 72.Google Scholar

2 In this essay I will be concerned mainly with Rawls's views on equal opportunity and natural inequalities as expressed in A Theory of Justice. One reason for doing this is that my aim is to explore a type of position, namely resource egalitarianism, which, while held by others in addition to Rawls (such as G. A. Cohen and Ronald Dworkin), seems to rely upon Rawls's discussion of these matters in A Theory of Justice. Resource egalitarians tend to take as relatively uncontroversial the very Rawlsian views I intend to subject to critical examination in this essay. In particular, resource egalitarians in the so-called “Equality of What?” literature (with the possible exception of Amartya Sen) appear to take it as a given that justice requires some sort of compensation for those whose life-prospects are lower as a result of undeserved lesser shares of social or natural resources. (See, e.g., Dworkin, Ronald, “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 10, no. 3 [Summer 1981]Google Scholar; Dworkin, Ronald, “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 10, no. 4 [Fall 1981]Google Scholar; Roemer, John, “Equality of Talent,” Economics and Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2 [10 1985]CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, G. A., “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Ethics, vol. 99 [07 1989]CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniels, Norman, “Equality of What: Welfare, Resources, or Capabilities” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. L Supplement [Fall 1990]Google Scholar; and Arneson, Richard, “A Defense of Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 62 [1991].)CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is this claim about a fundamental connection between natural inequalities and the requirements of justice, what I have called the Resource Redress Principle, which seems to play a prominent role in at least some of Rawls's arguments for the Difference Principle and for the Principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity in A Theory of Justice.

In Rawls, 's later work Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, there may be less reliance on the Resource Redress Principle as a relatively free-standing principle that is to be supported by appeal to “moral intuitions” or “considered judgments.” Instead, Political liberalism can be interpreted as basing the Principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle (as well as Rawls's First Principle of Justice) ultimately upon the complex idea (or ideal) of what free and equal persons who regard themselves as such would agree to as fair terms of social cooperation. Although I will attempt no systematic critique of the later Rawlsian position here, I will remark that attempting to base everything ultimately on the idea or ideal in question seems to place Rawls on the horns of a dilemma. Either he must admit that the concept of what free and equal persons who regard themselves as such (and seek fair terms of social cooperation) would agree to is too vague to yield anything as determinate and controversial as his principles; or he must lean heavily on what I have elsewhere called his Traditionist mode of justification, attempting to ground his prindples in the ideals of freedom and equality (and of fair cooperation) that he claims are distinctive of “our” political culture, that of modern (post 1776) political liberalism. The difficulty with the latter response is that it is dubious indeed to assume, as Rawls does, that there is a clearly dominant political culture in actual modern liberaldemocratic sotieties that endorses his principles or in whose commitments his prindples can be grounded. And, remarkably, Rawls does nothing to substantiate his claim that the materials for developing a consensus on his principles are actually present in the political consciousness or major documents and institutions of, say, American society.

If I understand it properly, the Traditionist mode of justification has a substantial empirical component insofar as it requires establishing that the prindples of justice that are to be justified are based on ideals that are actually present in a given political culture or tradition. A political culture or tradition is embodied in the political consciousness of a group of people and in the major political institutions of that society, and is expressed in the major documents (such as the constitution) of the society. Yet any attempt to connect the actual features of American (or other modern liberal-democratic) political consdousness and of our society's major documents or institutions with Rawls's interpretation of the ideal of a free and equal person is conspicuously absent from Rawls's work. For example, he does not examine the U.S. Constitution and attempt to show that it expresses an ideal of free and equal persons that is determinate enough to ground a construction of the original position capable of yielding his principles.

3 It seems that all of the theorists who offer a “resourcist” answer to the question “Equality of What?” fall into this category. In other words, to the extent that one is committed to the thesis that defines resourcist versions of egalitarian theories of justice—namely, that justice requires an equal distribution of resources—it seems that “resources” here must be understood broadly enough to include natural resources (genetic endowments) as well as social resources. Included in this class of theorists are Ronald Dworkin and G. A. Cohen. John Roemer regards himself as a resource theorist but apparently restricts the resources to be distributed equally to a type of social resource, alienable productive assets. (See Dworkin, , “What Is Equality? Part 2”Google Scholar; Cohen, , “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”Google Scholar; and Roemer, , “Equality of Talent.”)Google Scholar

Whether there is a principled way an egalitarian resource theorist can restrict resources to social as opposed to natural resources is quite unclear. Dworkin, at least, is quite explicit that the term “resources” is to include natural assets as well as social ones.

4 Roemer, , “Equality of Talent,” p. 154.Google Scholar

5 On p. 100 of A Theory of Justice, Rawls appears to equate the principle of equal opportunity with what he calls the principle of redress, and to say that equal opportunity thus understood is required by the principle of equal respect for persons:

This [the principle of redress] is the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for. Thus the principle holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and those bom into the less favorable social positions.

6 As compared with the distributive interpretation, the aggregative version of the Resource Equality Principle also has a serious drawback. It requires very strong (cardinal) comparability among all types of resources, including natural and social. To compare different individuals' bundles of total resources of all types, presumably requires knowing what contribution each item in the bundle makes toward an individual's well-being.

However, at this point the aggregative version of the Resource Equality-Principle threatens to undermine the whole rationale for a resourcist as opposed to a welfarist approach to Matters of justice. That rationale consists of two elements. On the one hand, those advocating a resourcist approach (and rejecting welfarist approaches) typically deny the possibility of making such strong welfare comparisons. On the other hand, some resourcists, including Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, contend that due respect for the autonomy of persons makes it impermissible to impose any public standard of comparability (which the aggregative version of the Resource Equality Principle would require), because doing so would violate the right of each person to determine his or her own good. The appeal of a resourcist approach to questions of justice is supposed to consist chiefly in the fact that it avoids both the problem of devising a strong metric for comparing welfare across persons and the violation of respect for individual autonomy that would occur if there were an attempt to impose any such measure as a public standard of justice. Thus, while it is true that opting for the aggregative rather than the distributive interpretation of the Resource Equality Principle avoids the implication that resource equality requires genetic intervention in the “natural lottery” in all circumstances, it does so at the cost of adopting a version of the Resource Equality Principle that threatens to undermine the whole resourcist approach.

7 For excellent analyses of various aspects of the American eugenics movements in international comparative perspective, see The Well-Bom Science, ed. Adams, Mark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; especially illuminating is Adams's introductory essay. See also Kevles, Daniel, In the Name of Eugenics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).Google Scholar

8 See Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 63–80.Google Scholar

9 Some of Rawls's later writings suggest a different argument in favor of the Resource Equality Principle, one which does not rely (at least not explicitly) upon the Formal Principle of Justice. The central idea of this line of argument is that free and equal persons, who regard themselves as such, and as members of a society of such persons understood as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, would not simply accept a situation in which they had lower life-prospects due to undeserved differences in natural or social resources. See, for example, Rawls, , Political Liberalism, pp. 15–34.Google Scholar

Perhaps Rawls's point can be expressed this way: In a situation in which undeserved differences in natural or social resources led to some having lower life-prospects, those with lower life-prospects, so far as they viewed themselves as free and equal persons in a cooperative venture for mutual benefit, would take themselves to be treated as less than equals by their fellows. That is to say, from the perspective of persons conceived as Rawls conceives them for purposes of a liberal theory of justice, allowing undeserved differences in natural or social resources would count as unequal treatment of equals, thus violating the Formal Principle of Justice. In other words, if the members of sodety allowed such factors to result in lower life-prospects for some persons, then those persons, so far as they conceived of themselves as free and equal and so far as they conceived of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage among free and equal persons, would take this state of affairs to be a public expression of a collective judgment that they were not in fact moral equals to those with higher life-prospects.

The problem with this argument for the Resource Equality Principle is that the crucial statement about the beliefs of individuals who view themselves as free and equal cooperators for mutual advantage with others seems to beg the question. As a descriptive, empirical generalization about the way people, or most people in a society like ours, in fact see themselves, it remains wholly unsupported by anything Rawls says. Moreover, in a pluralistic society such as ours in which there are significant differences of judgment about what recognition of the fundamental equality of persons requires (not to mention about whether justice requires intervening in or compensating for bad luck in the natural lottery), it is unlikely that the needed empirical support would be forthcoming. On the other hand, if the statement is taken as a normative one that is somehow implicit in the normative concept of a free and equal person, then it seems equally dubious. (There may be disputes, of course, over which is the correct normative concept of a person.) Precisely what is at issue is whether a proper recognition of the equality of persons as free beings requires implementation of something like the Resource Equality Principle.

10 See Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

11 Buchanan, Allen, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991). pp. 82–83.Google Scholar

12 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, p. 72.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 73.

14 Ibid.

15 For a discussion of the difficulty of drawing a coherent line between justice and charity, see Buchanan, Allen, “Justice and Charity,” Ethics, vol. 97, no. 3 (1987), pp. 558–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Those familiar with the extremely illuminating work of Amartya Sen will no doubt find familiar this notion of deprivation and of justice requiring a distribution of resources to prevent deprivation rather than to achieve equality as such. (See, e.g., Sen, Amartya, “Equality of What?” in McMurrin, Sterling M., ed., Liberty, Equality, and Law (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1937)Google Scholar; and Sen, , Commodities and Capabilities [New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1985].)Google Scholar To my way of thinking, though in some respects Sen's approach seems to be in the resourcist camp, he succeeds in avoiding the mistakes I attribute in this essay to other resourcists such as Cohen, Dworkin, and Rawls.

17 It is important to add the qualifier “other things being equal” here. For one thing, a serious effort to bring the most severely disabled up to the level of a “decent” life would be prohibitively expensive—would entail an unacceptable restriction on the opportunities of the better off. What I have in mind is what is sometimes referred to in bioethics circles as the “medical black holes problem.” Given an indefinitely expanding technology, efforts to bring every severely disabled person up even to some rather modest level of functioning could absorb vast amounts of resources. My own view is that justice does not require this sot of sacrifice.

18 A resource egalitarian might make one last attempt to persuade me otherwise. Suppose that we know that unless something is done to prevent it, a child will be born, not with a deprivation, but with somewhat lower life-prospects due to some genetic condition. Are we not morally obliged to prevent this from occurring, if we could do so without excessive costs and without violating any important moral principles (such as that requiring respect for the rights of prospective parents, etc.)?

It is hard to know what to make of this example, even if one shares the intuition of those who advance it—namely, that we should intervene. Part of the problem, of course, is the vague inclusiveness of the qualifying phrase “without excessive costs and without violating any important moral principles.” But even apart from that, there is another problem with such an appeal to intuitions. Even if one admits that it would be a good thing, morally speaking, to undertake the intervention (subject to the qualifying phrase), and even if one goes further to say that we ought to undertake it, we are still quite some distance from the desired conclusion, namely, that equal opportunity or some other principle of justice (such as equal respect for persons as such) requires us to do so.

For one thing, it does not seem to be the case that justice demands that we bring about everything that is morally good or everything that would be an improvement for some person. For another, we usually think of what is a matter of justice as being that which a person is entitled to as a matter of right, such that if she is not provided with it, she may correctly charge that she has been wronged. However, from the fact (if it be such) that in some sense it would be better (even better from a moral point of view) if persons did not have lower life-prospects due to undeserved natural differences, or that it would be a good thing if we prevented this, it does not follow that by not intervening to bring about this better state of affairs we wrong those with lower life-prospects. Moreover, I think it is fair to say that many of us simply do not share the resource egalitarian's intuition that if we (society? the state?) do not intervene in such a case, then the individual in question can reasonably say that she has been wronged, that some right of hers has been violated.

If, on the other hand, the point of this appeal to intuitions is not that to not intervene is to wrong the person, but rather simply that it would be a good thing to intervene and that, other things being equal, we ought to bring about good things, then one can hardly quarrel with it. Considerably more will be needed, however, to show that not intervening is incompatible with a proper recognition of the fundamental equality of persons, with equal opportunity, or with some other principle of justice.

19 If it is to be plausible, such a principle would have to be qualified by a clause to the effect that supplying a person with resources necessary for a minimally decent life does not involve excessive costs. Given the apparently indefinitely expanding horizon of medical technology, enormous amounts of resources could be expended in making marginal improvements in the lot of the most severely disabled individuals (the “medical black holes problem” I mentioned in note 17). A proper recognition that persons have only one life to lead and that they should be allowed to give special preference to their own projects and to those with whom they are closely affiliated surely places significant limits on what each of us owes to others as a matter of general obligations of justice.