Ronald Dworkin, Impersonal-Personal Preferences for Equality of Welfare [false dichotomy]
This equality excludes impersonal preference (survival of species). This impersonal preference is not Weberian, no interest in diminishing discretion, no preference for people-in-general as societies.
Ronald Dworkin wrote:
Chapter 1
Equality of Welfare
II. A First Look
There is an immediate appeal in the idea that insofar as equality is important, it must ultimately be equality of welfare that counts. For the concept of welfare was invented or at least adopted by economists precisely to describe what is fundamental in life rather than what is merely instrumental. It was adopted, in fact, to provide a metric for assigning a proper value to resources: resources are valuable so far as they produce welfare. If we decide on equality, but then define equality in terms of resources unconnected with the welfare they bring, then we seem to be mistaking means for ends and indulging a fetishistic fascination for what we ought to treat only as instrumental. If we want genuinely to treat people as equals (or so it may seem), then we must contrive to make their lives equally desirable to them or give them the means to do so, not simply to make the figures in their bank accounts the same. …
… Some philosophers think of welfare as a matter of pleasure or enjoyment or some other conscious state, for example, while others think of it as success in achieving one’s plans. …
[The] ideal [of equality of welfare] states the political principle that, so far as is possible, no one should have less welfare than anyone else. If that principle is sound, then the ideal of equality of welfare may sensibly leave open the practical problem of how decisions should be made when the comparison of welfare makes sense but its result is unclear. …
III. Conceptions of Equality of Welfare
There are several theories in the field about what welfare is, and therefore several conceptions of equality of welfare. …
The first group I shall call success theories of welfare. These suppose that a person’s welfare is a matter of his success in fulfilling his preferences, goals, and ambitions, and so equality of success, as a conception of equality of welfare, recommends distribution and transfer of resources until no further transfer can decrease the extent to which people differ in such success. But since people have different sorts of preferences, different versions of equality of success are in principle available.
People have, first, what I shall call political preferences, though I use that term in a way that is both narrower and more extended than the way it is often used. I mean preferences about how the goods, resources, and opportunities of the community should be distributed to others. These preferences may be either formal political theories of the familiar sort, such as the theory that goods should be distributed in accordance with merit or desert, or more informal preferences that are not theories at all, such as the preference many people have that those they like or feel special sympathy for should have more than others.
Second, people have what I shall call impersonal preferences, which are preferences about things other than their own or other people’s lives or situations. Some people care very much about the advance of scientific knowledge, for example, even though it will not be they (or any person they know) who will make the advance, while others care equally deeply about the conservation of certain kinds of beauty they will never see.
Third, people have what I shall call personal preferences, by which I mean their preferences about their own experiences or situation. …
… The second class of theories of welfare I shall call conscious-state theories. Equality of welfare linked to that sort of theory holds that distribution should attempt to leave people as equal as possible in some aspect or quality of their conscious life. … I shall use the words “enjoyment” and “dissatisfaction” indiscriminately to name the full range of desirable and undesirable conscious states or emotions that any version of a conscious-state conception of equality of welfare might suppose to matter. … So there are unrestricted and restricted versions … One version aims to make people more equal in enjoyment without restriction as to source, another only in the enjoyment they take directly and from nonpolitical preferences, and another in the enjoyment they take directly and from personal preferences only. …
IV. Success Theories
… If any society dedicated itself to achieving any version of equality of success (or of enjoyment), it could do at best only a rough job, and could have only a rough idea of how well it was doing. Some differences in success would be beyond the reach of political action, and some could be eliminated only by procedures too expensive of other values. Equality of welfare so conceived could be taken only as the ideal of equality, to be used as a standard for deciding which of different practical political arrangements seemed most or least likely to advance that ideal on the whole as a matter of antecedent tendency. But precisely for that reason it is important to test the different conceptions of equality of welfare as ideals. Our question is: If (impossibly) we could achieve equality of welfare in some one of these conceptions, would it be desirable, in the name of equality, to do so?
Political Preferences
I shall begin by considering equality of success in the widest and most unrestricted sense I distinguished, that is, equality in the fulfilment of people’s preferences when these include political as well as other forms of preferences. … Officials could not know whether … a person’s political preferences were fulfilled until they knew whether their distribution fulfilled everyone’s preferences equally, including his political preferences, and there is danger of a circle here. But I shall assume that equality of welfare, so conceived, might be reached in such a society by trial and error. Resources might be distributed and redistributed until everyone pronounced himself satisfied that equality of success on the widest conception had been achieved. [Discretion?]
We should also notice, however, a further threshold difficulty: that it would probably prove impossible to reach a reasonable degree of equality in this conception even by trial-and-error methods in a community whose members held very different and very deeply felt political theories about justice in distribution. For any distribution of goods we might arrange, some group, passionately committed to a different distribution for reasons of political theory, might be profoundly dissatisfied no matter how well they fared personally, while others might be very pleased because they held political theories that approved the result. But because I propose to ignore practical or contingent difficulties, I shall assume a society in which it is possible to achieve rough equality in the amount by which people’s unrestricted preferences were fulfilled, that is roughly equal success on this wide conception, either because people all hold roughly the same political theories, or because, though they disagree, anyone’s dissatisfaction with a solution on political grounds could be made up by favoritism in his personal situation, without arousing so much antagonism in others as to defeat equality so conceived for that reason. … [Discretion?]
… Suppose no one holds, in any case very deeply, any formal political theory, but each is generally benevolent. Many people, however, by way of what I called a political theory in the extended sense, sympathize especially with the situation of one group of those less fortunate than themselves … and have special preferences that these be looked after well. …
… [We] have good reason to reject the unrestricted conception of equality of success, by eliminating from the calculation of comparative success both formal and informal political preferences, at least for communities whose members differ in these political preferences, which is to say for almost all actual communities with which we might be concerned.
We might just pause to consider, however, whether we must reject that conception for all other communities as well. Imagine a community in which people by and large hold the same political preferences. … For if a distribution is reached that everyone regards with roughly equal overall approval, and the force of individual political convictions, in each person’s judgment of how well he regards it, is simply to approve the result because everyone else does regard it equally, then the distribution must be one in which each person regards his own impersonal and personal preferences as equally fulfilled as well. Suppose Arthur is less satisfied with his impersonal and personal situation than Betsy. Arthur can have, by hypothesis, no political theory or attitude that could justify or require a distribution in which he is less satisfied in this way than Betsy is, so Arthur can have no reason to regard the distribution with as much general or overall approval, combining political, impersonal, and personal assessments, as Betsy does. …
Impersonal Preferences
We must surely restrict equality of success still further by eliminating, from the calculation it proposes, at least some of what I called people’s impersonal preferences. For it is plainly not required by equality that people should be equal, even insofar as distribution can achieve this, in the degree to which all their nonpolitical hopes are realized.
Suppose Charles very much and very deeply hoped that life would be discovered on Mars, or that the Great American Novel would be written within his lifetime, or that the coast of Martha’s Vineyard would not be eroded by the ocean as it inevitably continues to be. Equality does not require that funds be taken from others, who have more easily fulfilled hopes about how the world will go, and transferred to Charles so that he can, by satisfying other preferences he has, decrease the overall inequality in the degree to which his and their nonpolitical preferences are fulfilled.
Should any impersonal preferences be salvaged from the further restriction this suggests? It might be said that the various impersonal preferences I just took as examples are all impossible dreams or, in any case, all dreams that the government can do nothing to fulfil. But I cannot see why that matters. If it is right to aim to decrease inequality in disappointment in all genuine nonpolitical aims or preferences, then the government should do what it can in that direction, and though it cannot bring it about that there is life on Mars, it can at least partially compensate Charles for his failed hopes by allowing him to be more successful otherwise.
In any case, I might have easily taken as examples hopes people have that are not impossible, or even particularly difficult, for government to realize. Suppose Charles hopes that no distinctive species will ever become extinct, not because he enjoys looking at a variety of plants and animals, or even because he thinks others do, but just because he believes that the world goes worse when any such species is lost. He would overwhelmingly prefer that a very useful dam not be built at the cost of losing the snail darter [a fish]. … [Only] the payment of a vast sum of public money, which he could use to lobby against further crimes against species, could bring his welfare, conceived as the fulfilment of all nonpolitical preferences, back to the general level of the community as a whole. … I do not think that equality requires that transfer, nor do I believe that many, even of those who find appeal in the general ideal of equality of welfare, will think so either.
Of course equality does require that Charles have a certain place in the political process I described. He must have an equal vote in selecting the officials who will make the decision, and an equal opportunity to express his opinions about the decision these officials should take. It is at least arguable, moreover, that the officials should take his disappointment into account, perhaps even weighted for its intensity, in the general cost-benefit balancing they undertake in deciding whether [a species-destroying] dam should be built all things considered …
… But none of this comes near arguing that the community treats Charles as an equal only if it recognizes his eccentric position … no matter how singular his impersonal preferences are. …
But someone might still protest that my arguments depend on assigning to people impersonal preferences that are in the circumstances unreasonable, or, rather, unreasonable to expect the community to honor by compensating for their failure. My arguments do not, it might be said, suggest that reasonable impersonal preferences should not be honored in that way. But this introduces a very different idea into the discussion. For we now need an independent theory about when an impersonal preference is reasonable or when it is reasonable to compensate for one. It seems likely that such a theory will assume that a certain fair share of social resources should be devoted to the concerns of each individual, so that a claim for compensation might be appropriate when this fair share is not in fact put at his disposal, but not if deciding as he wishes or compensating him for his disappointment would invade the fair share of others. …
Nor does it seem implausible to restrict a conception of equality of welfare to success in achieving personal, as distinct from both all political and all impersonal, ambitions. … Of course people do care, and often care very deeply, about their political and impersonal preferences.
But it does not seem callous to say that insofar as government has either the right or the duty to make people equal, it has the right or the duty to make them equal in their personal situation or circumstances, including their political power, rather than in the degree to which their differing political convictions are accepted by the community, or in the degree to which their differing visions of an ideal world are realized. On the contrary, that more limited aim of equality seems the proper aim for a liberal state, though it remains to see what making people equal in their personal circumstances could mean. … [Equivocal discretion?]
Equality of Personal Success
… Equality of welfare proposes … to make people equal in what is really and fundamentally important to them all. Our earlier conclusion, that in any event the fulfilment of political and impersonal preferences should not figure in any calculation aimed at making people equal in welfare through distribution, might well be thought to damage that appeal. For it restricts the preferences that people are meant to fulfil in equal degree to what I have called personal preferences, and people do not care equally about the fulfilment of their personal preferences as opposed to their political convictions and impersonal goals. Some care more about their personal preferences, as opposed to their other preferences, than others do. But a substantial part of the immediate appeal I describe remains, though the point would now be put slightly differently. Equality of welfare (it might now be said) makes people equal in what they all value equally and fundamentally so far as their own personal situations or circumstances are concerned. …
… Can we make a further distinction between the value someone finds in his own life and the value he believes it has for him? I am not sure what that latter phrase would mean as part of this contrast. We sometimes say that a person puts a low value on his own life when we mean, not that he is not proud of the life he has or will lead, but rather that he counts the value of that life low compared with the value he puts on his duty or the lives of others. But we are now considering something different, not the value someone puts on his own life as compared with his moral or impersonal values, but the value he puts on that life as part of the assessment of his own situation.
The Source:
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Harvard University Press 2000
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.