Boston Review_ Equality and Responsibility by John E. Roemer

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on Review: Equality and Responsibility by John E. Roemer

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Equality and Responsibility

John E. Roemer

International political events of the last fifteen years indicate deep popularskepticism about the egalitarianism of the welfare state: the latest dramaticexample, for Americans, may be the Republican sweep in the recentcongressional elections. The reasons for this skepticism are complex, butthey are partly philosophical. Many people associate egalitarianism, and thepolicies of the welfare state in particular, with a rejection of individualresponsibility. They accuse the modern welfare state of being a "NannyState," which seeks to take care of citizens -- ministering to their needs,

indemnifying them against all major harms, and relieving them of anypersonal responsibility to make their lives go well.

In this essay I aim to answer this charge. I will present a form ofegalitarianism founded on the idea of equality of opportunity -- theprevailing conception of social justice in western liberal democracies.According to this widely shared conception, society must provide a "levelplaying field," and individuals should face the consequences of their ownchoices; those who do well are entitled to the fruits of their success, andthose who fare poorly cannot ask for rectification. But exactly what isrequired to level the playing field?

According to one conventional answer, government should eliminate legalbarriers to social mobility, require that employers use meritocratic hiringprocedures to fill jobs, and that some other institutions, such as schools, usemeritocratic procedures to fill slots.[1]A second, more liberal answer, wouldrequire equal access to education for all citizens, and insist, more generally,that people receive equal amounts of various resources that society canprovide. I shall argue that equality-of-opportunity often requires that peoplereceive quite unequal amounts of the relevant resources -- without denyingthe personal responsibility that is at the core of the "opportunity" idea. Thisproposal probably entails considerably more equality of income and wealththan currently exists in the United States. Before getting into the details,

though, let's consider why equal opportunity seems so attractive in the firstplace.

Freedom, Responsibility, Opportunity

Equality-of-opportunity is commonly contrasted with equality of outcome(or result). An advocate of equality of outcome must stipulate what thatoutcome should be: among the candidates are income, satisfaction, lifeexpectancy, welfare, or the probability of leading a life deemed successful.Political philosophers have actively debated this over the past 30 years.Although this topic is extremely important, it is not my concern here, and so

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I shall simply assume that a particular result has been decided upon, let ussay, the degree of success a person rates his life as having. Thus, if equalityof outcome were our society's theory of justice, then social policy wouldendeavor to distribute resources so as to equalize, as far as is possible, thedegrees of success that people rate their lives as having; if equality ofopportunity were our society's theory of justice, then social policy wouldendeavor to distribute resources so as to equalize the opportunities peoplewould have for making their lives successful, on their own accounts ofsuccess.

Suppose I have three children, and I wish to give them equal opportunities toachieve successful lives. I will allocate the resources at my command -- myown parental time devoted to the children, the money I spend on theireducation --- to achieve this goal. Perhaps one child is slow to learn: equalityof opportunity among my children will require that I spend more money onher education than on the education of the others. Without such differentialexpenditure, her accessibility to success will probably be lower than for theother two. Suppose one of my children is not slow to learn but has anemotional cyclicity, clearly inborn, which makes it harder for him to carryout plans, or succeed in school. Then equality-of-opportunity may well

require that I spend more time with this child than with the others.

Suppose, at any rate, that I successfully implement a strategy of equalizingthe opportunities for my children until they each reach young adulthood: thatis, I provide the appropriate compensatory education for the slow child, andthe appropriate extra parenting for the emotional one. It turns out that theeldest, Alicia, develops a plan to be a music teacher; Bob, the middle child,although a poor athlete, develops a life ambition to reach the top of MountEverest on foot; and Karl, the youngest, although no more musically talentedthan Alicia, develops an ambition to be a concert violinist. I, unfortunately,am at this time diagnosed with a terminal illness, and must make out mywill. How should I divide my estate among the children, if I adhere to theequal opportunity principle?

One answer, perhaps the one most people would agree to, is that I shoulddivide my estate equally among the children. This, indeed, will have theeffect of giving Alicia a much higher probability of achieving success in herlife as she defines it than Bob and Karl will have - - for they would requireimmensely more resources than Alicia to have decent probabilities ofachieving success on their terms. (Bob will need to hire an army of sherpasand advisors to help him reach the top of Everest, perhaps many times; Karlwill require an expensive 18th century violin, not to mention a conservatoryeducation.) But equal division of my estate could be said to implement a

program of equal opportunity for life success, if we believe that I haveindeed equalized opportunities for my children in their formative years, andthe life plans they have formed are the consequences of having had thoseequal opportunities. Under this view, my children are each personallyresponsible for their conceptions of success, and equalizing their likelysuccess, under those conceptions, is unnecessary. In contrast, equality ofoutcome, or expected equality of outcome, would require me to give a largefraction of my estate to each of Bob and Karl, and a small fraction to Alicia.

As this example shows, equality-of-opportunity views are closely allied witha commitment to personal responsibility. Society, under such views, is not
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required to insure individuals against bad results, when they are theconsequences of individual choices made after opportunities have beenequalized. On the equality-of-outcome view, in contrast, society's mandate isto render all lives equally successful, at least in so far as this is feasible.Thus, persons are effectively not held responsible for their choices.

I have here ignored certain important kinds of things that happen to people,namely, pure bad luck -- bad luck that a person could have done nothing toavoid. The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin calls this "brute luck." Being

hit by a truck which runs a red light while you are in the pedestrian crossingis brute bad luck. Being hit by a truck while you are jay walking is not: for inthat case, you took a calculated gamble and lost, a gamble you need (andperhaps should) not have taken. Brute luck is to be contrasted with optionluck, which is the luck of the voluntarily taken gamble. Even under an equal-opportunity view, we might well decide that society should insure its citizensagainst brute bad luck, but not against option bad luck. Under an equaloutcome view, society must insure its citizens against bad luck of any kind,whether the consequence of voluntary gambles or not.

Citizens of western liberal democracies generally endorse equality of

opportunity, I believe, because we think it is morally correct to hold personsresponsible, at least to some degree, for their actions. This moral view aboutresponsibility devolves in turn from the western liberal view of the value ofindividual freedom. If individuals are to be free to choose how to lead theirlives, then they must be held accountable for those choices: otherwise such afreedom is vacuous. In economic phraseology, the cost of freedom isresponsibility. If, in contrast, we thought that individuals were not free, thattheir actions were all part of God's plan, for example, then it would not be soobvious that they should be held responsible for the consequences of thoseactions. In other words, a notion of individual freedom requires aconcomitant view of personal responsibility, with two qualifications: thatequality of opportunity has been implemented before responsible choices are

made, and that society insure individuals against brute bad luck.

An equality-of-outcome view, on the other hand, can be justified if onebelieves that there is no such thing as real individual freedom, perhapsbecause of predestination, or because the actions of persons can always bereduced to causes over which they have no control. Suppose one believesthat a person's behavior is completely determined by a combination of hergenetic make-up, and by influences upon her over which she has no control:the country and family into which she was born, the particular teachers andadults to whom she was exposed, etc. One could construct a tree of causes,so to speak, leading backward from any action the person takes, rooted

finally in an initial set of genetic and circumstantial variables beyond thereach of her powers. Freedom requires that an alternative action be possible,which this tree of causes does not leave room for. On this view, an equality-of-outcome conception of justice would be morally appealing. How, indeed,could we justify society's allowing persons to lead differentially successfullives if those lives are beyond the control of persons, and society could makelives more equally successful with a different social policy?

A Definition of Equality of Opportunity

Equality of opportunity, then, is closely connected to fundamental values of


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responsibility and freedom. But what exactly is it? My strategy in answeringthis question shall be first to sketch a rough account of equal opportunity,and then to proceed to a more concrete definition by reflecting upon someexamples. Finally, I hope to provide a procedure by which a society canimplement equality of opportunity as a social policy.

A person's actions are determined by two kinds of cause: circumstancesbeyond her control, and autonomous choices within her control. Anyparticular action a person takes, and its associated consequences, are thus

caused by a highly complex combination of circumstances and autonomouschoices. I say that equality of opportunity has been achieved among a groupof people if society indemnifies persons in the group against badconsequences due to circumstances and brute luck, but does not indemnifythem against the consequences of their autonomous choices. Thus an equal-opportunity policy must equalize outcomes in so far as they are theconsequences of causes beyond a person's control, but allow differentialoutcomes in so far as they result from autonomous choice. When there isequality of opportunity, then, no one will be worse off than others as a resultof factors beyond her control.

This definition suffices to convey the intuitive idea of equal opportunity.Now we need to make it more precise. That will require a way to decidewhich aspects of a person's behavior are due to circumstance and which toautonomous choice. And, once we have such a way, we will need to see howto implement it -- to separate consequences of behavior into those due toautonomous choice and those due to circumstance. The meat of my proposal,which follows, is a procedure for doing just this.

I shall proceed by example. Consider the problem of compensating personsfor lung cancer acquired as a result of smoking. Although people in oursociety have all been intensively exposed to warnings about the dangers ofsmoking, many persist in smoking, and of those, a fair share develop lung

cancer or other serious ailments that require costly medical care. Suppose wehold an equality-of-opportunity for health ethic. To what extent should thatmedical care be financed by society at large, and to what extent should theindividual have to pay? If, indeed, we decided that an individual wereentirely responsible for his choice to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day,then an equality-of-opportunity view would say that he should pay the costsof the consequent diseases.

The choice a person makes to smoke or not to smoke is in part determined byhis circumstances -- say, his economic class, his ethnicity, whether hisparents smoked, and his level of education -- and is in part a matter of

autonomous choice. (One might question whether economic class and levelof education are properly part of circumstances, since there is an aspect ofautonomous choice in determining them. I shall assume that, for the purposesof analyzing the smoking problem, these are circumstances, in the sense thata person does not consider the effect of his "choice" of economic class andlevel of education on whether or not he will come to smoke.) I propose, first,that society make a list of the factors beyond a person's control which itviews as influencing the decision whether or not to smoke. Second, wedivide society into groups or types according to individuals' values of thesefactors (i.e., a group consists of all persons whose factors all haveapproximately equal value). Suppose, for example, that the list of


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circumstantial factors society decides upon is: age, ethnicity, gender,occupation. Then one type will consist of all sixty-year-old White, femalecollege professors, and another of all sixty-year-old Black, malesteelworkers.

Society wishes to decide the social compensation a person should receive, inthe form of socially financed medical care, if he contracts lung cancer.Assume that the chances of contracting the disease increase with the numberof years a person smokes. Within each group, there will be a distribution of

years smoked: some people will smoke more, some will smoke less. Thisdistribution is a characteristic of the type, not of any individual. The societythat has chosen its list of circumstantial factors, determining type, shouldview the different locations of particular sixty year old Black steelworkers intheir group as due to their responsible choice, for their circumstances havealready been normalized by type, and similarly for sixty year old Whitefemale college professors. That a 60-year-old Black male steelworker ismore likely to have smoked for thirty years than a 60-year-old White femalecollege professor is a statistical fact not due to the autonomous choices ofindividuals, but to group: this is a characteristic of the smoking distributionsof the different types, not of any individual. Thus, the distribution of years

smoked within a group provides us with a way of calibrating the realopportunities of the members of a group. To take an extreme case, if all 60year old steelworkers smoked for thirty years, I would say that the choice of"not smoking" was not accessible to 60 year old steelworkers: as a 60 yearold steelworker, one would have had effectively no opportunity except tosmoke for thirty years. Given one's group, certain choices may be effectively,even if not physically, barred.

How, then, might one equalize the opportunity for a life free of lung cancer,or at least for a life free of shouldering the financial burden of contractingthat disease? I propose that we seek a distribution of socially financedmedical care which is equal, across groups, for all those who exercised a

comparable degree of responsibility in regard to smoking. To be specific,consider the college professor and steelworker who each have smoked themedian number of years for their types -- let's say 8 and 30 years,respectively. I view these two as having acted with comparableresponsibility. Alternatively phrased, the act of smoking 8 years for a White,female college professor and the act of smoking 30 years for a Black, malesteelworker are equally accessible acts, and this is because exactly one-halfof White female college professors smoked less than 8 years, and exactlyone-half of Black male steelworkers smoked less than 30 years (see figures 1and 2 on which the median smokers of the two groups are depicted).

Suppose, then, that society decides it should pay all the medical-care costs ofthe median professor who contracts lung cancer. Then it should also pay allthe medical care costs of the median steelworker. For the differences in thenumber of years smoked by these two smokers, each at the median of hertype, are due entirely to circumstances that society has decided are beyondtheir control. Of course, society will end up paying much more in thetreatment of steelworkers' lung cancer than college professors', because thosewho have smoked for thirty years will have a far higher incidence of diseasethan those who have smoked for eight.

Now I have taken the median smokers of their types as an example: but my


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equality-of-opportunity procedure requires that we treat persons fromdifferent types in the same way wherever they are located in their typedistributions. Thus the White female college professor who is at the 80thcentile of the smoking distribution of her type should also be provided withsocially financed medical care to the same extent as the Black malesteelworker who is at the 80th centile of the smoking distribution of histype.[2]Though this uniform treatment across groups is attractive, it turnsout to be impossible to achieve for all centiles simultaneously. So some kindof compromise proposal for the social allocation of that resource to lung

cancer victims has to be used. I have such a compromise proposal, but I willnot present the details here. The salient point is that, for every centile of thesmoking distribution, the social transfer is approximately equalized acrossgroups, but within each group, those who exercised more responsibility willbe given more favorable treatment. People are indemnified against theconsequences of being in a particular group, but not against theconsequences of their autonomous actions within that group.

One aspect of the procedure I've described needs further justification.Suppose Fernando and Gabrielle belong to different groups, and that eachhas smoked the median number of years for their group. Why do I consider

them comparably responsible for their actions, and hence, why do I say thatthey should receive equal social compensation for their bad healthoutcomes? The justification lies in the observation that the frequencydistribution of years smoked for a group is a characteristic of the type, not ofany person. People are not responsible, by hypothesis, for the group they arein; hence they cannot be held responsible for the frequency distribution ofyears smoked that is characteristic of their group. Exactly at what point in thedistribution Fernando sits, however, is, by definition, a consequence of hisautonomous choice: for society has already factored out everything that itconsiders to be beyond Fernando's control, in so far as his smoking behavioris concerned, by assigning him to a group. Thus if exactly half the people ofFernando's type have smoked less than he, and exactly half the people ofGabrielle's type have smoked less than she, then it is reasonable to say theyhave exercised comparable degrees of will power, or have taken comparabledegrees of responsibility, for their smoking behavior.

Before leaving the smoking example, I should perhaps say that, in the lastfew months, new information has emerged relevant to the assignment ofpersonal responsibility in decisions to smoke. We have learned that cigarettemanufacturers discovered, many years ago, that nicotine is addictive, and thatmany or all of them add nicotine to natural tobacco to enhance this addictiveeffect. Thus, another factor in a person's circumstances, which I omitted inthe example as described above, is the biological predilection of a person to

nicotine addiction. Suppose our medical technology were sufficientlyadvanced to ascertain the degree of this predilection for all persons. This,indeed, should also be a component of type, as it is clearly beyond theperson's control. We might find that this new factor explains a good deal ofthe variance in years smoked within the types into which we initiallypartitioned society. As this example indicates, the development of medicaltechnology, in many cases, will cause society to add new components to thelist constituting the definition of type. As this happens, some actions thatformerly appeared to be matters of personal responsibility come to be seenas due to circumstances beyond the person's control.
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Consider a second example, one which is perhaps more important than thesmoking case, and more likely than health to be viewed as subject to anequal-opportunity ethic, rather than an "unqualified right" ethic. In oursociety, one's income, and probably also one's success in life, dependspositively on the amount of education one receives. Income is stronglycorrelated with years of education, and, although I am not familiar with thesurvey data on this question, I would conjecture that the degree to whichpeople rate their lives as successful is also strongly correlated with thenumber of years of education they receive. Let us, at any rate, assume that

this is so. Now the years of education a person acquires depend, as always,on two kinds of factor: circumstances beyond the person's control, andautonomous choices within her control. Suppose we, as a society, wish toimplement a social policy of equality-of-opportunity for income; to do so,we shall concentrate on the relationship between years of education acquiredin youth and income earned in later life. The general principle I have beendescribing says that we should design a social policy which indemnifiesindividuals against the low incomes which are the consequence of poor orinsufficient education in so far as that insufficiency is caused by theindividual's circumstances, but not indemnify her against the incomeconsequences of insufficient education to the extent that that insufficiency is

a result of autonomous choice. For simplicity of exposition, I shall assumethat income in society is exactly determined by the number of years ofeducation one receives.

I shall proceed just as before. Society's first step is to make a list of factorsthat it deems to be beyond a person's control and that affect the years andquality of education that he receives. Perhaps this list will consist in thefollowing: the years of education his parents had, his parents' income, hisethnic group, his natural intelligence (assuming society can agree on how tomeasure this), the number of siblings he has, and whether he was raised by asingle parent or by two parents. All of these factors are beyond a person'scontrol, and they all arguably affect the number of years and/or quality of aperson's education. The next step is to partition society into groups, whereeach consists of all persons who share the same values of these six factors.Now each type will include a large number of persons; there will be afrequency distribution of years of education for each type, and, of course,these frequency distributions will differ across types. The frequencydistribution of years of education is a characteristic of the group, not of anysingle individual. Since persons are not responsible for their type, theycannot be responsible for this distribution. Where, however, a person sits inthe frequency distribution of his type is viewed as a consequence of hisautonomous choice, because, in listing the six factors of circumstance, wehave, by social decision, exhausted the conditions we regard as beyond a

person's control. So the differences in educational level reached within a typeare due, by definition, to differences in autonomous choice, and hence,matters of personal responsibility.

My equality-of-opportunity proposal in this example is a policy thatequalizes, through the tax-transfer system, the income across types of allthose at a given location in the group's frequency distribution of education.Concretely, if Alice has achieved the median level of education for her type(i.e., exactly half of the persons of her type have gotten less education thanAlice), and if Bernard has achieved the median level of education for histype, then our tax system should attempt to equalize the income of Alice and


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Bernard, even though they may have acquired quite different amounts ofeducation. It is important here to recall that I am assuming that income iscompletely determined by years of education.

A comment about my equality-of-opportunity proposal is in order. I have notattempted to provide a theory of what aspects of a person's behavior reallyare beyond his control, and what aspects are really within the realm ofautonomous choice. Each society, according to my account, decides thisquestion for itself. Thus, different societies will generally choose different

lists of factors comprising a person's circumstances. An individualisticsociety like the United States would probably include fewer factors in the listof a person's circumstances than a social-democratic one like Sweden. Thusmy proposal is not metaphysical, in the sense of trying to solve the deepproblem of what actually is beyond a person's control; it is political in thesense that it depends on the current views of the society in question.According to the proposal, each society can implement equality-of-opportunity according to its own conception of what features of a person'ssocial and biological environment constitute factors beyond her control.

Objections

The conception of equality-of-opportunity that I have described is not theconventional view. It appears to support a far more egalitarian society thanwe now have in the United States. No doubt it will generate considerabledisagreement. To forestall some of that, I will respond here to a few likelyobjections.

One criticism -- suggested in the work of Ronald Dworkin -- may be that thedistinction between what a person is and is not responsible for is not thesame as the distinction between what she has and has no control over. I havein fact assumed that those two distinctions are, by definition, the same.

Dworkin's view may seem paradoxical; I shall try to make it less so byexample. Suppose a child, who grows up in a poor family, whose parentslack education beyond primary school, who is exposed to no books in thehome or any kind of high culture, develops preferences in which educationhas a low value. He does not care to become educated, and feels educationwill not make his life more successful. He identifies with these preferences,views them as intrinsic to who he is. Then Dworkin, I think, would have tosay that such a child does not require any social compensation for the lowlevel of education he acquires, and the consequent low income he earns.

Dworkin places tastes with which a person identifies, and the choices thatfollow from them, within the realm of personal responsibility, regardless of

whether those tastes were formed or induced by factors over which theperson had no control. I, on the other hand, do not make the distinctionbetween autonomous and non-autonomous choice depend on what the personthinks, but rather on what society deems to be within or beyond a person'scontrol. Thus, the unfortunate child I have just described, or the adult thatchild becomes, would be due social compensation under my notion of equalopportunity for income, but not under Dworkin's.

A second objection comes from the vantage point of efficiency. It is all welland good, you might say, to attempt to equalize opportunity, and, you mightagree that my proposal is the way to accomplish that goal. But you might


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further say that the cost of equality of opportunity may well be a substantialdecrease in national income: for the incentive effects of the redistributivetaxation that would be necessary to implement my program -- say, in thesecond example of education and income -- would be such as to decrease thelabor supply of highly skilled, and hence high-income, individuals. If thosewho are in 'fortunate' types, and who earn large incomes, are taxed toincrease the incomes due those in unfortunate types under my proposal, theymight work less, and in that case national income per capita would fall,perhaps disastrously.

There are two responses to this objection. The first relates to the incompletedefinition of the equality-of-opportunity proposal that I have here made. Infact, the social policy I advocate is the one that equalizes opportunities (forincome, say) at the highest possible levels. It is not possible to make thisprecise without going into some mathematical detail, but the idea is, roughly,that if a taxation policy results in opportunities for income being equalized ata very low level, then it is not the optimal policy. It is true that, under myproposal, mean income, that is, national income per capita, may well bebelow what it would be without any redistributive taxation: the benefitassociated with that reduction in mean income would be increased equality

of opportunity.

The second response to the objection is that, if you think social policy shouldattempt to maximize national income per capita, then you simply cannotadvocate equality of opportunity. These two goals are just not simultaneouslyachievable. If, indeed, the highly skilled would to some degree withdrawtheir talents from productive use if their incomes were highly taxed, thenmaximizing mean income in a society could only be accomplished at theexpense of equalizing opportunities. Thus, to the extent that our societymeasures its economic success by the rate of growth of mean income (i.e.,GNP per capita), it is not measuring success by the extent to which societyachieves equal-opportunity. If we rigorously adopt an equality-of-

opportunity ethic, then we must redesign our statistical measures of whatconstitutes economically successful social policy.

A third objection is of a deeper philosophical nature. It is a conservative, ormore properly, a libertarian objection, and runs as follows. It may be thatchildren are not responsible for their genetic and social/familialenvironments, but it does not follow, according to this objection, that the justsocial policy entails compensating persons for the consequences of thedifferences in their genetic and social circumstances. Persons legitimatelydeserve to benefit from their natural genetic endowments; and parents, asautonomous adults, are responsible for providing their children with

opportunities. Parents, furthermore, can legitimately bestow on and bequeathto their children the wealth they have legitimately earned. Society'slegitimate intervention is restricted to providing, let us say, free publicschools and enforcing anti-discrimination laws.

This position may be ethically coherent; perhaps it can be given a soundlogical foundation. It is, indeed, the task of libertarian political philosophy todo so. But this position is not consistent with equality of opportunity. Wejust cannot say that Fernando and Gabrielle, or Alicia and Bernard, faceequal opportunities when the success of their lives will be vastly different,and quite predictably so, on account of features of their environments over


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which they have no control.

I have sketched some of the reasons that lead western, liberal democrats toadvocate equality of opportunity, and spelled out what I think equality ofopportunity entails. Although I did not argue for equality of opportunity asan ethic, I do believe that equality-of-opportunity is a sound ethical position.Perhaps the procedure I have outlined for implementing it will convincesome readers of that soundness. Others, perhaps, will be convinced thatequality-of-opportunity entails what I say it does, and therefore will

reconsider their advocacy of an equal-opportunity doctrine, because theybelieve the consequences of an equality-of-opportunity view are unfairlyegalitarian. Finally, there will be those who believe that the equal-opportunity view I have outlined is unfairly inegalitarian, that people whosuffer large harms should be indemnified by society, even when they areresponsible. I do not claim to have resolved these disagreements, but to haveclarified their terms and to have shown that we can be egalitarians withoutrejecting the fundamental ideal of personal responsibility.

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Originally published in the April/May 1995 issue of Boston Review
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Boston Review_ Equality and Responsibility by John E. Roemer

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