Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 17:16:29 -0700
Subject: Re: Exploitation and unproductive labor


  Once again Justin amazes me by his ability to 
  think at length out loud on serious and complex 
  issues while laboring under the burden of 
  weighty exam pressures.  As a former law student 
  I cannot fathom how he does it!
  
  I don't wish to add to his burdens too much at 
  this point, but I would like to contribute one 
  thought to the discussion which he can come back 
  to later if he likes.  
  
  What is, and what is wrong with, injustice?  And 
  what is the nature of coercion, and how does it 
  diminish human freedom?  My view, rather 
  sketchily stated, is as follows.  What's wrong 
  with injustice is that the wills of some are 
  allowed to dominate the wills of others.  Justice 
  seeks to minimize this kind of domination by 
  setting up rules for distribution which aim at 
  keeping the wills of parties to various 
  transactions, not in harmony, to be sure, but in 
  fair power relations with one another.
  
  At this point Justin will probably want to jump 
  in and say "Aha!  So fairness is doing 
  independent work here and so it's not really 
  about coercion."  But I am not so sure.  
  Fairness, in my view, is the characteristic of 
  states in which wills are brought into some sort 
  of balanced distribution of power.  Justin seems 
  to think that just entitlements are determinable 
  independently of ascertaining what the parties 
  will (or would will in situations in which their 
  wills are not dominated by the wills of others).  
  But what determines what is an acceptable set of 
  rules for setting up and maintaining a balanced 
  pattern of distribution of power and other goods 
  is that the parties concerned (would) freely will 
  those rules, i.e. without being subject to the 
  domination of others.  When there is imbalance, 
  when power is so unevenly parcelled out that some 
  wills dominate others either systematically--no 
  mutually acceptable rules even get to be set 
  up--or in violation of acceptable rules in a 
  given instance, then we have unfairness.  But 
  this dominating power over another's will which 
  goes to the heart of unfairness, it seems to me, 
  is also the essence of what is morally 
  objectionable about coercion.  It's not just that 
  one will happens to *prevail* over another--that 
  happens all the time and is a consequence of the 
  impossibility of the (total) harmony of wills. 
  Rather, it is that someone lacks the power to 
  have his will, and the reasonable rules flowing 
  from that will, *respected* or given "its due".
  This is what is wrong with both injustice and 
  (immoral) coercion.  ("Coercion" sometimes has a 
  morally neutral meaning perhaps, being used 
  equivalently to "force".)  Moreover, to the 
  extent that one's will is not respected one's 
  freedom is reduced, one's agency is diminished in 
  power or scope.
  
  So justice and freedom are tied together by the 
  fact that they involve the interplay of human 
  wills.  (This is one reason why I included in my 
  earlier post the point about injustice being 
  impossible where the putative victim genuinely 
  consents to what is done to him.)
  
  In sum, the stealing objection still looks 
  plausible to me, because what that objection 
  points and objects to is that workers' wills are 
  being dominated by the capitalists with respect 
  to distribution of surplus (the actual rules 
  governing that distribution of surplus are not 
  what the workers would ideally will.  In other 
  cases of stealing, the rules are acceptable, but 
  they are not respected.)  This domination by the 
  capitalists is also the basis for the coercion 
  complaint, I think.  The workers are being 
  forced to give up what they would rather have, 
  and would have had--leisure, work satisfaction, 
  a share in the surplus, etc--had the rules being 
  set up in way that respected their wills.  This, 
  I think is a more important and more general 
  species of coercion than the 'added' coercion 
  experienced by workers in the workplace when 
  they are driven on hard by the bosses.  Moreover 
  the stealing of surplus can take place even 
  without the workers being especially driven on 
  at work by their bosses--indeed in a few cases 
  they might even get away with being lazy, yet 
  still be stolen from.  The wills of the 
  capitalists dominate the wills of the workers, 
  and this is both unjust and a diminishment of 
  the latter's freedom.  
  
  Peter


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