Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 21:54:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Exploitation and unproductive labor



Please pardon my (a) resurrecting this thread if no one else is interested
and (b) including Peter's post and his snippet of mine to refrsh folks'
memories.

We were discussing what's wrong with exploitation. I said there were two
theories, injustice, often construed as theft, and unfreedom. I was
attacking the theft version of the injustice view. Peter claimed that the
unfreedom objection and the theft objection are at bottom the same,
because what's wrong with theft is nonconsensual domination over the will
of another, the same thing as he thinks is wrong with unfreedom, or maybe
is unfreedom itself. I objected that the problemof happy slaves shows that
the two theories are independent. The idea is that happy slaves consent to
domination, so if we want to say that slavery is unjust evben when it's
consensual (and don't we?) we need some standard other than freedom to
explain why. This relaters to theft in that if the happy slaves consent to
being exploited, they're arguably no more robbed than free voters who
consent to taxes for the support of those unable to work.

Now what Peter does in the following is to go partway towards saying that
happy slaves wouldn't be exploited, if they were really happy. (But he
thinks, as a matter of empirical fact that slaves won't be happy.) This is
in fact what I think, sort of. The think I like abouty this sort of
approach is that it avoids positing ideal concorcive hypothetical states
of affairs standards for justice. I don;t like such standards because they
always seem qwuestion-begging. We Marxists posit hypothetical states of
equal power. Rightw ing libertarians can come back positing as their
standard states of nature where everyone starts out with his natural
talents. ANd so forth. But of course if Peter agrees with me I cannot use
this objection against his view.

If Peter is right, I must be committed to his view about theft. But I am
not sure that I am, for two reasons. The first is that I want to stick to
a much more primitive theory of theft than his, on which (mine) it is
wrongful taking of property to which the thief is not entitled. What's
wrong with that, I think, is that the thief is not entitled to what he
wrongfully takes. Now, I agree with Peter that entitles are determined by
a sort of abalnce of wills, althoiugh I'd put this is social terms rather
than individual ones. I's say that entitlements are set at the point at
which the lower classes will revolt if the upper classes take any more
than they do. That's bourgeois justice. Proletarian justice is a
hypothetical but not ideal state of affairs, the limits on the power of
the proletariat as ruling class to take that other groupds in society
would insist on if the proletariat were to continue to rule. (Although
hypothetical, this is not ideal, because it is empirically
determinatble--a guess about what it would be in bourgeois society would
be a guesws about a future state of affairs, not an a priori ideal.) For
either bourgeois or proletarian justice this makes the standard for
entitlements, an indirectly theft, what's necessary for stable governance.
Consent obviously plays a role here, but it's not dispositive. 

Peter's theory, however, because it appears to have no external
standard--external to consent--and because it is purely individualistic as
he dewscribes it (involving the wills of particular individuals), although
I'm not sure he's wedded to that view, is both overbroad and overnarrow.
It's overbroad because it will count as theft any nonconsesual taking,
even, say, of the capitalist's wealth by the workers. It's overnarrow
because it doesn't pick up adequately on the way that consensual takings
can be theft, for instance, where people have been ideologically
brainwashed or induced to accept certain social arrangements that benefit
them in what appear to be unfair ways.

This connects to the my second point. I'm not sure that Peter is willing
to go as far as I am in saying that if slaves really could be happy their
lot would not be unjust. He retreats from this in saying that well, we do
want to know what their wills would be if the were uncoerced. This,
however, just falls back into the theory I attacked as merely ideal and
question-begging.

Anyway, enough for now.

--Justin 

On Sat, 4 May 1996 PBurns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu wrote:

>   
> >>Where did you go to law school, Peter? And did you finish?
>   
> Glasgow University, Scotland.  Yes, graduated in 1981, and 
> joined the Jesuits later that same year.
>   
> Justin goes on:
>   
> >>Unfortunately this will not do. The force-and-freedom independent 
> standard of fairness creeps back into (b). Why assume that as the starting 
> position? Well, you want to rule out situations where, e.g., brainwashed 
> workers toil happily for exploiting bosses, where their consent is 
> supposed to give the unequal abalnce of wills the legitimacy that, say the 
> democratically elected worker-manager's authority over the direct workers 
> is supposed to have in virtue of consent. But this presupposes, in a way 
> taht isd either question-begging or drawn from some source other than the 
> balance of the wills itself that the first situation, the "happy slaves," 
> as my old advisor Don Herzog put it, is unfair. Consent theory of this 
> sort therefore cannot ground a theory of justice. (Rawls and HAbermas are 
> stucj with this problem.)
>   
>   Justin, I don't see that we need to presuppose 
>   that the "happy slaves" situation IS unfair.  In 
>   fact, in my earlier posts I explicitly bit the 
>   bullet on this, and said that if freely formed 
>   wills consented to "injustice" then it wouldn't 
>   *be* injustice.  If people voluntarily, 
>   genuinely, and autonomously willed to be slaves, 
>   then it wouldn't be unjust.  Of course, that's a 
>   big 'if'.  Likewise, if workers freely, 
>   genuinely, voluntarily, autonomously willed that 
>   the economic surplus generated by their labor 
>   should be transferred to capitalists, then this 
>   would be a case of donation, not theft, and 
>   would not be unjust.  But again, that's a big 
>   'if'.  What makes slavery and capitalism unjust 
>   *in fact*, is that both are *in fact* based on a 
>   failure to preserve balance in the clash of 
>   autonomous wills.  I am not, contrary to what 
>   Justin alleges, basing my view of what justice 
>   requires on some abstract principle about what 
>   is a just distribution, such as equal shares for 
>   all, independent of what people autonomously 
>   will.  (Of course, a bit of abstract ideality 
>   does enter the picture because wills are often 
>   not in fact autonomously formed, so we ask the 
>   hypothetical question, what would they choose if 
>   they were autonomous?)  If there is an 
>   underlying value here it is that of 
>   being/having/exercizing an autonomous will, but 
>   this is the *same value* that underlies the 
>   objection to coercion.  Justice seeks protection 
>   for autonomous willing by promoting a balance of 
>   wills in concrete social interactions.  In doing 
>   this it sets itself at the same time against 
>   coercion.  But autonomous willing involves 
>   consent.  Now the question is, why is a 
>   distribution not based on consent unfair?  
>   Because it fails adequately to value autonomous 
>   willing.  But that's what I was saying, that's 
>   where I came in.  There is, pace Justin, no 
>   standard of fairness operating here that is 
>   independent of the force-and-freedom criterion, 
>   because what that criterion is about is 
>   preserving the value of autonomous, 
>   non-dominated willing.
>   
>   
>   Peter





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