In A Theory of Justice, Rawls claims at the beginning that "the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of a society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation"(TJ, 6). That is to say, to evaluate whether a society is just or not, we do not have to know what everyone in the society is doing. It is enough to know how the basic structure of the society be arranged.
Following Rawls, in this article Julius argues that a basic structure is the subject of specifically egalitarian principles of distributive justice. As a matter of fact, what Julius plans to do is to offer a new version of Rawls' difference principle. According to Rawls' difference principle, inequalities in goods distribution are just "if they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society"(TJ 266).
Before proceeding to open her own argument, Julius recalls some difficulties for Rawls' account of distributive justice. Rawls plans to leave spaces for individual choice and action through the separation of institutional and personal spaces of decision. However, the separation implies that an inequality is not unjust if people can reverse it only by shift their personal decisions into special patterns. As G.A..Cohen points out, if we believe that basic structures are the subject of justice, we will conclude that justice principles fail to constrain those of our choices that play no part in shaping those structures.
Julius believes that Rawls' preoccupation with basic structure reflects not one but two distinct moral ideas. One is the idea that G.A.Cohen criticizes above. The other one is the thought that "social structures constituting societywide distributional mechanisms give rise to a set of sui generis obligations binding on the people who inhabit them, and that justice or a big, self-contained piece of justice consists in the satisfaction of those obligations"(BSVE, 327). In the following paragraphs, what Julius does is to argue how such kind of distributional mechanism is reasonable and possible.
Julius' arguments originate from a general idea that "parties to social interaction treat one another unfairly unless they aim for equality, and that fair treatment in interaction is their reason to aim for equality"(BSVE, 323). According to Kant, I must not treat you merely as a means. If I act with the intention of leading you to act in a way that advances my own interests, it implies I am framing you. To avoid treating you merely as a mean, I must not frame you unless I can justify doing so by appeal to your own interests.
Julius imagines a world where people in it interact interdependently in general. Everyone will find that her own action and interests are causally connected to the actions of manny other people. Then he argues that it is possible for every member of a group to combine for a common profile which is a list of sequences of individual actions, if the following conditions are satisfied:
(i)that her decision to act her part of that profile is supported by her belief that the others will act their parts;
(ii) that this belief of hers is supported by agreements she has reached with the others or by conversations she has had with them about what they will all do or by observation of actions that the others have chosen in order to promote this belief of hers;
and (iii) that she herself has promoted other's beliefs that she will act her own part of the profile.(BSVE, 329).
Once conditions of combination are satisfied, the efficient cooperation will be more profitable for every number. Since the combination permits me to share benefits produced by the cooperation, I will discover more and more possibilities to do so as to lead others to act in ways that benefit me. So in fact I am framing those others by my choice of this stance. But this framing must be justified to e everyone whose action is influenced by it.
Then Julius turns to the hypotheses of social reproduction. He try to justify the combination to everyone involved by explaining the process of social reproduction. He assumes that a person's situation is a list of factors relevant to the intentional explanation of her stance in interaction. These factors of situation might influence the characters of her basic interests, goals, and values,the classification of her possible actions, evaluation of consequences of her actions, and method for advancing her interests or goals. Once people's situations are stylized in certain ways, we can divid the population into types and all members of a type share the same situation. This implies a distribution of actions in the population. Then an assignment of situation and a distribution of actions by types together pick out a distribution of goods by types. Then we can describe the evolution of people's situations by some law of motion in the population distribution of actions. It implies that "some of interaction's invariances over time are explained by the mutual reproduction of pairs of situation assignments and action distributions, and that some of the similarities and differences between people's lives along distinct trajectories are explained by similarities and differences between the basic structures that those trajectories sustain"(BSVE, 330).
Since every path of interaction is attracted to some basic structure. Between two distinct structure X and Y, if I want to promote combination for X because I believe that interaction structured by X will run more to the advantage of people of my type, then I will have to justify the combination to people of other type that I am to frame. A basic structure is a shaper of action and also a distributor of goods.
If X were strictly best for every type, then we could justify combining for it by arguing that everyone does better there than in any alternative. But we cannot justify X to everyone by justifying it to each person considered in isolation from others since people's interests do not in fact go with each other. If the reproduction of X is to be justified to everyone, its justification to each person must instead invoke the constraint that it also be justified to others. Then the selection of X over other structures is justified. However, there is no distribution whose selection is acceptable to everyone outright, we must choose the distribution whose selection is most acceptable for the person for whom it is least acceptable. It follows that X can be justified to every type only if people of it's worst-off type do no worse than people of the worst-off type of any other structure.
This is Julius' argument for difference principle. His point is that just basic structures are those that everyone can knowingly reproduce without wrongly framing anyone. And he believe that a knowingly reproduction of some basic structure would survive all criticism from the point of view of framing.
Abbreviation:
TH. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
BSVE A.J.Julius, Basic Structure and the Value of Equality, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 31, NO. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 321-355.
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