Abstract
In ‘Justice and Nature’, Thomas Nagel claims that social institutions are not responsible for inequalities caused primarily by nature, as opposed to socially caused inequalities. I evaluate this claim. To do so, I distinguish causal responsibility from substantive responsibility. I argue that Nagel rightly identifies conditions in virtue of which social institutions are not substantively responsible for an inequality, but the causal responsibility of nature is irrelevant for that assessment. The natural/social distinction is, I hold, misleading, and I offer two pragmatic reasons to stop using it. Besides, past criticisms to the natural/social distinction have questioned whether identifying the causal responsability of nature for an inequality is descriptively meaningful, epistemically possible, and morally relevant. My reconstruction of Nagel’s view avoids these criticisms, I explain, by depriving the causal responsibility of nature of any role to identify an inequality as naturally caused. Moreover, I show that my reconstruction of Nagel’s view, purged of the natural/social distinction, helps to justify the asymmetrical treatment of class-based inequalities and inequalities among people with different native endowments in the Rawlsian principle of fair equality of opportunity.
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Notes
Other senses of responsibility, such as responsibility as attributability of an action to ground the moral appraisal of an agent (Scanlon 1998), are irrelevant for the purposes of this paper.
This paper does not explore the distinction between pathologies and talent deficiencies. The argument of Hausman against the relevance of that distinction for assessments of justice could face specific objections that would break the analogy with my argument against the natural/social distinction.
I will not consider libertarian views, which reject the substantive responsibility of social institutions for inequalities that are the outcome of legitimate transactions in a free market economy (Nozick 1974), regardless of whether nature played a role in causing those inequalities and whether social institutions could prevent or neutralize them.
Before, Lewontin ([1974] 2006) had already illustrated the difficulty to distinguish the contribution of two causes to the effect of their interaction. He made it in the following way: ‘if two men lay bricks to build a wall, we may quite fairly measure their contribution by counting the number laid by each; but if one mixes the mortar and the other lays the bricks, it would be absurd to measure their relative quantitative contributions by measuring the volumes of bricks and of mortar’ (Lewontin [1974] 2006, p. 521).
In extreme cases, social institutions cannot prevent nor neutralize an inequality. Lippert-Rasmussen (2004) considers labelling these inequalities as natural. He distinguishes ‘the most inclusive view’ under which we consider ‘any logically possible’ social system as feasible, from ‘the most exclusive view’ under which a social system is feasible if society could bring it about ‘within a relatively short period of time’ (Lippert-Rasmussen 2004, p. 200). In both cases, the identification of a natural inequality would involve hardly workable counterfactual assumptions about the distribution of goods in alternative social systems. More importantly for my purposes here, the question of whether social institutions should prevent or neutralize natural inequalities is meaningless if social institutions cannot do so (assuming ‘ought’ implies ‘can’). True, we could ask whether social institutions should promote research to enable control of natural inequalities. But then it is because those inequalities may be social after all.
Segall (2013, p. 158) resists the claim that there is nothing natural in the disadvantages that, for example, a deaf or a blind person suffers. His argument is that the deaf and the blind would choose to hear and to see, respectively, over a full accommodation of social life to their condition. This understanding of an inequality as ‘natural’ compares conditions, not persons. If deafness or blindness were preventable or curable and at a reasonable cost, then the ‘natural’ disadvantage (in Segall’s terms) of a deaf or blind person would be socially caused, whereas if those conditions were irremediable, then the corresponding ‘natural’ inequality (again, in Segall’s terms) would be naturally caused only in the sense that social institutions would not be responsible for the deafness of the deaf and the blindness of the blind.
If social institutions cannot remedy a regrettable inequality in a certain good, a further question is whether they can and should compensate the disadvantaged by providing them with other goods (Hausman 2007, pp. 50–53).
Aas and Wasserman (2016, pp. 589–590) set different conditions to assess the responsibility of social institutions for an inequality in occupational opportunities. Their aim is to secure fair equality of opportunity for people with disabilities. For this purpose, Aas and Wasserman argue for a reasonable accommodation of physical structures and social practices. For example, the office buildings of IT companies should have elevators, so that the prospects of paraplegic applicants depend on their programming skills and not on their ability to climb stairs (Aas and Wasserman 2016, pp. 579 fn. 5, 594).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Serena Olsaretti and Luis Rodriguez Abascal for incredibly helpful feedback on various drafts of the paper. I would also like to thank Nicolás Brando, Matthew Clayton, Selene Cruz, Anca Gheaus, Cristina Sánchez Muñoz, and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for very useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of the paper, and Andy Mason for very fruitful discussion on issues addressed in this paper. Besides, I would like to acknowledge the audience at a Warwick Graduate Conference in Political and Legal Theory and the audiences at two seminars of the Public Law and Legal Philosophy Department at Autonomous University of Madrid. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
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de los Santos Menéndez, F. Naturally and Socially Caused Inequalities: Is the Distinction Relevant for Assessments of Justice?. Res Publica 27, 95–109 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09469-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09469-x