Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [61]
So, how do we adjudicate between these different claims—that music is a commercial product to be bought and sold, and that it is communication and should be free, and artists should be supported in some other way? Who deserves what here, and are the established property rights to be respected and preserved?
Reckoner
In political philosophy and in applied ethics, we regularly deal with the question of how to justly distribute limited resources. Probably the most famous and influential philosophical perspective on distributive justice is that of the American philosopher John Rawls.
Rawls’s 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, really changed the conversation going on in political philosophy. He put forth an ideal of ‘justice as fairness’: he wanted to construct an ideal of justice appropriate for liberal democracies; one which would not be dependent on any particular ideas of right and wrong, or of the nature of the “good life.” He claimed that, if we were able to ignore our own self-interested assumptions, based on the part of society in which we find ourselves and what we stand to gain or lose, we would all agree to distribute limited resources such as economic and political opportunity approximately as follows:
1. Everybody gets a robust set of basic rights and freedoms; as great as can be given alike to everybody, and
2. Whatever inequality there is should benefit the least among us.
How does he get to these principles? Let’s start with his claim that we all basically agree on the egalitarian principle that we should all, ideally, have the same rights and opportunities as each other, and nobody should enjoy special benefits or favors. But if we were to, for example, all enjoy the same income no matter what we did, then we’d all be worse off! We wouldn’t feel we were rewarded for our efforts, and we wouldn’t be motivated to achieve greater things, and our entire economy and society would stagnate and suffer.
So, even on an egalitarian basis, inequality is good, at least to some extent. But to what extent? There’s a classic problem in utilitarian theories of distributive justice—it has a number of different forms, but one of them is this: imagine a group of four people in a room. They have a pleasant conversation for an hour, resulting in, say, ten hedons, or arbitrary units of happiness (just assume we can measure that, okay?) per person, for a net gain of forty hedons. Okay, now imagine that they’re sadists. If three of them torture the fourth, we get, say, a gain of a hundred hedons each for the three torturers, and a loss of two hundred hedons for the fourth poor fellow, for a net gain of 100 hedons. So, if we use a pretty basic (and silly) interpretation of utilitarianism’s basic claim that the right action is the one that results in the greatest overall happiness, then it seems that the utilitarian would have to prefer that the sadists torture the fourth fellow.
Now, that’s not fair to the utilitarian position, and Rawls knows better than to use such a simplistic example, but it does demonstrate his point: we need to take into consideration the importance, not just of net gain of benefit, but of how that gain is distributed among persons. So, he says, we should allow inequality to increase only until it comes at the expense of anybody within the society. So, that rules out the sadist circumstance, and the four are left just having a pleasant conversation. In which, presumably, they politely avoid talking about how much they’d like to put the screws to the fourth fellow.
That’s the basic idea. Having a fair system of distributive justice would guarantee a basic set of benefits to everybody, and would only allow as much inequality as is still for the best for everybody. In the abstract, this sounds pretty uncontroversial. But what would this mean in practice? Let’s look at the question of distribution of wealth.
If some of us have wealth holdings, for example, of around $190,000, and others of around $5,500, then it is hard to see how even roughly similar kinds of opportunities for education, competition