Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [104]
Justice and Freedom
At stake in this debate is more than the abstract question of how we should reason about justice. The debate over the priority of the right over the good is ultimately a debate about the meaning of human freedom. Kant and Rawls reject Aristotle’s teleology because it doesn’t seem to leave us room to choose our good for ourselves. It is easy to see how Aristotle’s theory gives rise to this worry. He sees justice as a matter of fit between persons and the ends or goods appropriate to their nature. But we are inclined to see justice as a matter of choice, not fit.
Rawls’s case for the priority of the right over the good reflects the conviction that a “moral person is a subject with ends he has chosen.”30 As moral agents, we are defined not by our ends but by our capacity for choice. “It is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature” but rather the framework of rights we would choose if we could abstract from our aims. “For the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it; even a dominant end must be chosen from among numerous possibilities… We should therefore reverse the relation between the right and the good proposed by teleological doctrines and view the right as prior.”31
The notion that justice should be neutral toward conceptions of the good life reflects a conception of persons as freely choosing selves, unbound by prior moral ties. These ideas, taken together, are characteristic of modern liberal political thought. By liberal, I don’t mean the opposite of conservative, as these terms are used in American political debate. In fact, one of the distinctive features of American political debate is that the ideals of the neutral state and the freely choosing self can be found across the political spectrum. Much of the argument over the role of government and markets is a debate about how best to enable individuals to pursue their ends for themselves.
Egalitarian liberals favor civil liberties and basic social and economic rights—rights to health care, education, employment, income security, and so on. They argue that enabling individuals to pursue their own ends requires that government ensure the material conditions of truly free choice. Since the time of the New Deal, proponents of America’s welfare state have argued less in the name of social solidarity and communal obligation than in the name of individual rights and freedom of choice. When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Social Security in 1935, he did not present it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another. Instead, he designed it to resemble a private insurance scheme, funded by payroll “contributions” rather than general tax revenues.32 And when, in 1944, he laid out an agenda for the American welfare state, he called it an “economic bill of rights.” Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to “true individual freedom,” adding, “necessitous men are not free men.”33
For their part, libertarians (usually called conservatives in contemporary politics, at least on economic issues) also argue for a neutral state that respects individual choice. (Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick writes that government must be “scrupulously… neutral between its citizens.”34) But they disagree with egalitarian liberals about what policies these ideals require. As laissez-faire critics of the welfare state, libertarians defend free markets and argue that people are entitled to keep the money they make. “How can a man be truly free,” asked Barry Goldwater, a libertarian conservative and 1964 Republican presidential candidate, “if the fruits of his labor are not his to dispose of, but are treated, instead, as part of a common pool of public wealth?”35 For libertarians, a neutral state requires civil liberties