ResearchEarly Career Research Spotlight: Brian Berkey

Early Career Research Spotlight: Brian Berkey

This edition of the Early Career Research Spotlight focuses on the work of Brian Berkey. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy at Penn. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of California-Berkeley in 2012, and did his undergraduate work in Philosophy and Politics at New York University. Before moving to Penn, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. His academic work is in moral and political philosophy, and he has published papers on the demandingness of morality, individual obligations of justice, climate change mitigation obligations, effective altruism, and entitlements of justice for non-human animals.

You argue in several places that Rawlsian notions of justice should not apply only to social institutions, but to individuals as well. What is your argument, and why do you feel it is an important one for philosophers to consider?

I’ll say something about the second question first. The question whether principles of justice apply to individuals in addition to the institutions of what Rawls calls the “basic structure of society” is important for a number of reasons, both theoretical and practical. On the practical side, we live in a society, and a world, that’s radically unjust according to all plausible views of what justice is and what it requires of us. We all, and especially those of us who are net beneficiaries of injustice, have reasons to think carefully about what we’re obligated to do to try to at least reduce injustice. Important theoretical and conceptual issues bear on this question because what it makes sense to think we’re obligated to do to reduce injustice will depend at least in part on what we think justice and injustice are – that is, on what makes it the case that, for example, a distribution of resources is unjust.

The standard Rawlsian view about our obligation to reduce injustice is, roughly, that we’re obligated to work to make our institutions just, or at least less unjust, at least when doing so wouldn’t be all that costly for us. I think this view requires too little of us in a deeply unjust world like ours, and that attempts to make it adequately demanding, by, for example, eliminating the cost caveat and requiring that we work to promote just institutions even at substantial cost to ourselves, could imply that we’re obligated to act in ways that will do much less to reduce injustice than other things that we could do instead. For example, donating a substantial sum of money to a political campaign that would make our institutions much less unjust if it succeeded, but that’s in fact virtually certain to fail, would, intuitively, do less to advance the cause of justice than directing that money to an organization that reliably and effectively improves the lives of unjustly disadvantaged people.

Since it at least appears that it’s possible to reduce injustice by, for example, contributing to efforts that improve things for the unjustly disadvantaged in ways that don’t run through changes at the level of the basic structure, it’s unclear what principled reason there might be for thinking that, nevertheless, individuals can’t, in principle, have justice-based obligations to do this. But this is what Rawlsian “Institutionalism,” as I call it, implies.

Part of your argument relies on a difference of how to conceive of justice. You and G.A. Cohen argue that justice demands actual fairness of distribution of benefits and burdens, while Rawls and Alan Thomas argue that the procedure for distribution must be fair. What concerns do you have about purely procedural justice, and how does actual distributive fairness address them?

Rawlsians are committed to denying that it’s possible, in principle, for individuals to make the world less unjust by any means other than contributing to changes at the level of the basic structure of society. They’re committed, then, to rejecting the intuition that I pointed to in the previous paragraph that injustice can be reduced by directly improving the lives of the unjustly disadvantaged. That’s because they conceive of distributive justice in purely procedural terms, which means that a just distribution is defined as a distribution that has been brought about via the operation of just basic structural institutions. G.A. Cohen points out that this means that once just institutions are in place, the Rawlsian view implies that nothing individuals can do can make a society more just. He thinks this is implausible, because Rawlsian views allow (or require) incentive inequalities whenever these will maximize the absolute expectations of the worst off group in society, and individuals’ willingness to refrain from demanding incentives can limit inequality, which, he thinks, would improve things in respect of justice. I think Cohen is right about this, but I think it’s much more powerful to note what the pure procedural conception implies about changes in individuals’ behavior under unjust institutions. Consider the massive wealth inequality and significant absolute deprivation present in our actual world. Now imagine that tomorrow virtually every millionaire and billionaire starts consistently directing 90% of their income in ways that directly (that is, not via changes in basic structural institutions) improve the lives of the unjustly disadvantaged. I agree with Rawlsians that it would be better (even much better) if we could use those resources to make our institutions just, or at least significantly less unjust. But the pure procedural conception implies that the massive shift in individual behavior, and potentially massive improvements in the lives of many unjustly disadvantaged people, does not, and indeed cannot in principle, make the world any less unjust than it was before. I think this is deeply implausible.

One explanation for its implausibility is that it seems to imply that whatever the grounds for caring about justice are, they’re entirely separable from the grounds of our concern that people’s lives should go well. People’s lives going well would be a predictable consequence of achieving justice, perhaps, but a concern for people’s lives going well couldn’t play any role in explaining why we have the obligations of justice that we do, since that concern would also provide reasons to improve people’s lives directly. The main reason to reject the pure procedural view, then, is that it’s inconsistent with what on reflection seems clear to me: the ground-level concerns that give us justice-based reasons at least overlap to some extent with the ground-level concerns that give us beneficence-based reasons (that is, reasons to act so as to improve people’s lives). There may also be important justice-based reasons that don’t overlap with beneficence-based reasons, but any view on which there’s no overlap whatsoever will have quite implausible implications. Views about what justice is according to which it consists at least in part in distributive outcomes meeting certain conditions, on the other hand, clearly imply that individuals can improve things in terms of justice by doing things that will directly improve the lives of the unjustly disadvantaged. This seems to me an important advantage of views of this type.

A big topic in the news these days is democratic socialism, as more Democrats are supporting such policies (and others, like Howard Schultz, are actively opposing them). It sounds like you have a nuanced opinion of this topic, as your philosophy comes from Rawls’ liberalism framework but also supports direct action to overturn inequality. How does your philosophy relate to democratic socialism?

There’s an inescapable empirical dimension to assessing precisely what kinds of institutional arrangements Rawlsian principles of justice support in any particular context. This is especially true with respect to economic structures, since what the second principle (fair equality of opportunity plus the difference principle) requires is, roughly, that our economic institutions are arranged so as to maximize the absolute prospects of the worst off, within a framework that provides as much as possible for equality of opportunity, given how individuals would be expected to behave within the different candidate institutional arrangements. This is, I think, a perfectly reasonable view about how we should go about thinking through which institutional arrangements to support. But for Rawlsians it’s also the way to determine what justice requires. As long as we have in place the institutions that will maximize the prospects of the worst off, taking individuals’ expected behavior within the institutional constraints as given, then distributive justice is achieved. How much inequality, and how low a social minimum, will turn out to be compatible with justice, is at least to a significant degree an empirical question, and the answer will depend at least in part on how willing better placed people are to refrain from maximally pursuing their own interests within the system.

Rawls recognized all of this, of course, and argued that in a just society, individuals would be committed to the principles of justice, and that this would shape the choices that they would make within the constraints of just institutions in a way that would limit inequality and deprivation. He also thought that the only economic structures that would in fact be compatible with his principles were liberal socialism and property-owning democracy. These systems fall very much on the left side of the political spectrum, and I think it’s at least reasonably accurate to think of them as particular specifications of what many of those currently advocating democratic socialism would like to see in terms of policy directions.

One important thing to notice about at least much of the debate about the policies advocated by democratic socialists is that a lot of the criticisms of them are empirically based, and moreover are made in terms that appear consistent with Rawlsian commitments. For example, proposals for higher taxes on the rich, or for a higher minimum wage, are often criticized on the ground that they would reduce employment, with negative effects for the lowest paid workers in particular. Whether this is true is an empirical question, but if it is true, then it’s unclear that Rawlsians have the resources to insist that the status quo is less just than a relevantly available alternative. This is the core of a line of argument that has been developed in recent years by John Tomasi and others according to which Rawlsian premises, applied to the real world, support broadly free market economic policies. If their empirical claims are correct (which, by the way, in at least some cases I doubt – but that doesn’t affect the important theoretical point), then Rawlsian Institutionalists would be committed to allowing that much more right-leaning institutions, and therefore most likely much more inequality than they have generally accepted, and perhaps also a notably lower social minimum, are consistent with justice.

There are Rawlsian responses to these arguments that attempt to insulate the commitment to left-leaning economic institutions from these empirical criticisms, but I haven’t been especially persuaded by them. I think that the only way to maintain the intuition that large enough inequalities are necessarily unjust is to reject Institutionalism. This allows us to explain the injustice of those inequalities in terms of failures by individuals to comply with direct requirements of justice, in cases in which explanations in terms of institutional failures are unavailable given how individuals in fact behave and are in fact motivated.

With respect to democratic socialism, I take the most important implication of my view to be that it might make sense to support at least certain democratic socialist policies only if enough individuals can be counted on to be motivated to act in roughly the same socially beneficial ways that they would act under more right-leaning institutions, even though they’ll personally gain less from doing so. Rawls was right that we might have reasons to accept incentive inequalities as a matter of policy, and how large they need to be to maximize the absolute prospects of the worst off is an empirical question. But on my view this gives us reason to think that institutional policy, even alongside willingness by all individuals to support whatever policies are called for, might not be sufficient for justice. Individual commitments to directly promote the aims of justice more than institutions can permissibly require might be necessary too.

You are also an advocate for effective altruism, claiming that institutional critiques are not incompatible with the philosophy’s core commitments. Explain how effective altruism can make the substantive institutional critiques its critics argue it is incapable of.

Effective altruism’s core commitments imply that individuals should direct efforts toward bringing about institutional change to the extent that there are reasons to think that doing that will promote whatever values we have reason to care about more than other things that they could do instead. There are many difficult issues, both empirical and normative, that are relevant to assessing what EA’s general principles imply we should do, and, contrary to what some critics have suggested (e.g. that EA is just utilitarianism by another name), the EA movement generally recognizes this and takes seriously a wide range of views.

A number of critics have argued that EA is objectionable because it doesn’t encourage sufficient focus on bringing about large-scale changes in our institutions, and in particular our global economic institutions. These criticisms share some important features with Rawlsian Institutionalism, although the critics are not all (or even primarily) Rawlsians. Perhaps most importantly, they tend to suggest that well off individuals don’t have strong reasons to do things like give substantial portions of their income to organizations that there’s good reason to believe directly improve the lives of badly off people, and that instead they should be engaging in political activity aimed at making relevant institutions just, or less unjust. Some of the critics seem worried that EA implies that our obligations are quite demanding, and want to reject that view. But others aren’t motivated by that kind of worry, and seem instead to think that only large-scale institutional changes can accomplish much that we have strong reasons to care about.

In my view, EA is not objectionably demanding (e.g. the Giving What We Can pledge requires committing to give 10% of one’s income, which for at least most well off people would make little difference to their quality of life, while potentially improving things for badly off people significantly), and what individuals should do depends on what we have reason to believe will advance the values that we have reason to care about most. There’s a range of reasonable views about what those values are, and about how to reason about which actions seem likely to advance them more. But one of the ground-level values is certainly improving the lives of badly off people. Given that, it’s at least in principle possible that we could have most reason to direct resources to efforts to directly improve people’s lives, rather than to efforts to reform institutions. Supporting institutional change efforts is very much among the things that we might have most reason to do with our time and resources, but the principles that ought to guide our thinking about what to do shouldn’t rule out other possible alternatives at the outset.

What is your perspective of philosophies that argue effective altruism is unachievable within the context of capitalism, given how it incentivizes the acquisition of wealth and encourages competition?

Many critics of effective altruism are opponents of capitalism, or at least of the type of global capitalism that we have today. They’re skeptical that we can, for example, eliminate poverty and deaths from easily preventable causes, or make a significant dent in global inequality, without large changes in the structure of global economic institutions, and in particular without replacing capitalism with some form of socialism. Many of them also think either that effective altruist efforts can’t really do much good as long as capitalism remains in place, and/or that effective altruism is at least primarily a way for well off people to make themselves feel better about benefitting from the injustices of global capitalism and justify to themselves the continued pursuit of wealth within the competitive capitalist system.

I don’t deny that the latter concern might be accurate in some cases. Very wealthy people who give ten percent of their income to effective altruist efforts and as a result think that they’re living ethically exemplary lives, even if their lifestyles otherwise look pretty much like those of other very wealthy people, are on my view overly complacent. But the danger of complacency and the tendency to rationalize not doing more is, in my view, spread across those who express (typically genuine) concern for the those disadvantaged by global injustice – it’s not unique to effective altruists. For example, I think it’s noteworthy that while effective altruists call directly for well off people to commit to giving up a non-trivial portion of their income to improve the lives of the global poor, many critics of effective altruism seem uninterested in calling for significant voluntary economic sacrifices from the well off, preferring to talk instead about the need for global institutional change and political mobilization for that change. These things aren’t incompatible, though, so I suspect that there’s a bit of rationalization on the side of effective altruism’s opponents too, to the effect that as long as one engages in, for example, protests of global capitalism, political organizing, and so on, it’s acceptable if one doesn’t give up a significant portion of one’s income or significantly reduce one’s luxury spending.

None of this should be surprising, I think. All of us who benefit from deep injustices will struggle to some extent to fully come to terms with what, in my view, are the demanding and wide-ranging moral obligations that we have, and we’re all liable to fall into some self-deception and rationalization. But if these tendencies are spread across those with different views about what specifically we should be focusing on in our individual contributions to the fight against injustice, then we can’t point to these tendencies in others as a reason for skepticism about their views in particular. Rather, we need to attend to the normative arguments in favor of competing positions directly, as well as relevant empirical evidence about what’s likely to bets promote the ends that we should care about, while trying in good faith to avoid giving excessive weight to our own interests in any dimension of the status quo, whether it’s the nature of our economic institutions or the lifestyle choices that we’ve grown accustomed to making within those institutions.

If we do this, then I don’t think there’s any reason to think that, in principle, efforts to improve the lives of badly off people (or accomplish other morally important goals) can’t succeed under capitalism. And I think there’s good reason to believe that some such efforts are succeeding, and that any case for not supporting those efforts and focusing instead on working to overthrow capitalism faces a significant argumentative burden.

What projects do you plan on pursuing in the future?

Right now I’m working on a series of papers in business and economic ethics, as well as doing some more work on effective altruism. In one paper, I argue that in order to make sense of the intuition that consensual and mutually beneficial employment arrangements, such as some cases of sweatshop labor, are wrongfully exploitative, we must accept that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to the global poor. In another, I argue that Rawlsian Institutionalism has limited implications for business ethics, and that in light of these limits we should accept a view according to which principles of justice apply directly to corporations. In a third, I argue that while there are some ethical constraints on the permissibility of consumer boycotts, they are less stringent than some have recently argued, and grounded more in substantive considerations and less in procedural ones.

 

You can ask Brian Berkey questions about his work in the comments section below.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Professor Berkey might be interested in research I have been doing for fifty years or so, on the human factors engineering/ergonomics, cybernetics, phenomenological/analytic/virtue theory/Riceorian approach to resolving the Nozick-Rawls issue. Thinkers debate the end state vs process justice, but I do not hear of mixed justice. This involves where Ricoeur would, paralleling his criticism of Cartesian dualism, resolve the Nozick-Rawls’ debate by reintroducing egalitarianism into libertarianism. This also has Kantian implications: communitarianism without contract is blind, contract without communitarianism is empty. Philosophy restricts its discussion to contract poles of Nozick-Rawls,without talking of the broader issue of communitarianism and contract.

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