Wealth in society

Photo by Andrew V Marcus

One of the main themes in my work over the years has been thinking about equality and inequality from the point of view of distributive justice. Coming from a well-meaning, middle-class, left-wing family, I always thought that great inequality was unjust, particularly the inequality of wealth. When I got to university as an undergraduate, I was pleased that this was one of the topics that I would be studying, just a few years after John Rawls had published his famous Theory of Justice. He argued that a just society is one where the worst-off are made as well off as possible. To judge the justice of our society, we should look at the wealth and income of the worst-off. We should see if the wealth of the worst-off can be increased without others becoming poorer than the worst-off people were before. In other words, we judge the justice of a society by how it treats those who are worst off.

This is a very appealing view, but it does allow inequalities. It says that if we need inequality to make the worst-off better off, we should accept that. Some people on the left argued that it is not right and that we should aim for greater equality, even if it means that everyone suffers. This debate continues. Should we allow incentives for the rich, and they would bring the poor with them – a rising tide raises all boats – or should we say no: what’s important is income equality, even if that makes everyone a little bit worse off than they might have been otherwise?

Income-based inequality

I was brought up to think that there are more important things in life than money, and the wealth and income that people should have. I was going to build my political philosophy around the view that everyone should have the same amount of wealth and income, but I actually believed that wealth and income weren’t as important as, for example, having good friends, enjoying good books, going for walks and having a rich social life. It didn’t seem to me that the best way to think about a good society, or even an equal society, was just in terms of the distribution of wealth and income. So, I had to reflect long and hard on the question of equality.

A society of equals is one where no one looks up to anyone and no one looks down on anyone. No one is exploited, no one is dominated and no one is subjected to violence. A society of equals is not so much about the distribution of resources but the way in which we relate to one another and the many ways in which we regard one another.

Loneliness and justice

If people are lonely, it can make them extremely unhappy and can diminish the other experiences in their lives. There’s a question about whether, from a point of view of equality, we should worry about loneliness. Some people have argued that loneliness is not really something that we can think about from the point of view of distributive justice. They have said that if it was, we would have to identify people who are lonely – and that could be a problem to begin with – and compensate them for their loneliness. It would mean giving the lonely extra money. We would have to tax people with plenty of friends and give some of that money to people who are lonely to compensate them for their loneliness, to remedy it, and that would bring about a just society. But this is an absurd policy. Who is going to promote the policy of taxing people who are not lonely and giving some of that money to people who are lonely?

There are many problems with this. We would have to identify and stigmatise people who are lonely. This leads to gaming the system. How do we know who is really lonely? Those with friends could pretend to be lonely to get the benefit. How would that be checked? From the point of view of distributive justice, where justice is about distributing things to make up for disadvantage, we have to leave loneliness out of the theory of justice.

Remedy for loneliness in society

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People who are lonely should receive our attention from the point of view of trying to create a society of equals. That then raises the question of what we should do about it. We already know what to do but we are not very good at doing it. The one thing we should do is think about town planning. We should build our communities so that people can easily access public transport so that they can get around and see one another. We should arrange things like subsidised evening classes so that people who are lonely can go out in the evenings and have social contact, maybe even make new friends. There are things we can do to alleviate loneliness. What’s interesting about this method is that no one has to identify as lonely to benefit from it. In this system, we don’t have to classify society into two groups – the lonely and the non-lonely.

Disability in the context of justice

We would generally agree with the broad claim that disability is a matter of justice and injustice – some people are born with disabilities while some people acquire them during their lives. If steps are not taken, people with disabilities tend to have a significantly worse experience of their lives than the people who do not have those disabilities.

There are ideas in political philosophy and also in social policy about how society should respond to disability. The first instincts that people have is to think of disability as belonging to the medical realm. People who have a disability are not necessarily ill but they are like people who are ill. We assume that the remedy for disability should be in the field of health services, so disability is about hospitals, maybe about counselling and therapy; most people assume that if someone has a disability, there’s a social obligation to help remedy that disability and cure it, if we can, through medical means.

Sure, we want to find ways to cure the disability, but what I found while reading disability literature is that a lot of people, even with very significant disabilities, didn’t think of disability as belonging to the medical realm. Therefore, they didn’t think that better medical attention would necessarily bring justice. Another way of understanding disability is to think of it more like difference than impairment; that is, people are born into this world with all sorts of different mental and physical characteristics.

We have designed a world that makes it easier to live in if you have certain types of characteristics. For example, if you have working legs, then it is much easier to get around than if you need a wheelchair. We have designed society on the assumption that people can climb stairs. We have designed society by assuming standard things about mobility. When we designed toilets, for example, or classrooms or workplaces, we designed them for a typical type of bodily configuration and, in the process, we left out people who don’t conform to that model.

Fixing disability in society

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The social model of disability says that we should work out how to change our society so that more people can fit into it. Another way of thinking of this is to say that the problem of disability is a type of lack of fit between the disabled person and the world. The medical model tries to change the person so that they fit into our existing world. The alternative social model of disability says that we should change the world so that more people can fit into it – ideally, everyone would fit into it. This means, for example, adding ramps where there were stairs, making sure there are good lifts or elevators in buildings, making sure that when we have an event on the internet, there is a good way for people to appreciate it, even if they are visually impaired. This method is about trying to make everything as inclusive as we can.

The alternative social model also involves changing our social attitudes, in which we see people with disabilities as just like everyone else. They could need some different attention, but then we are all different in different ways and we all need different attention for different things.

Difference between equality and fairness

Some people deny that there is a difference between an equal society and a fair society; they say that equality and fairness are the same. In some definitions, they are just the same. In this context, we should make a distinction between equal treatment and fair treatment, and understanding equal treatment as the same for everyone.

Karl Marx wrote about this in his Critique of the Gotha Program. He wrote that some socialists were trying to build a programme on the idea of an equal share, or a right to an equal share. Marx found the idea to be ridiculous because some people have bigger needs than others. Some people have dependents. If we give everyone an equal share, some people are going to be able to meet their needs while others are going to go hungry. Therefore, a fair allocation would take into account not just dividing things up equally, but also people’s needs and their contributions depending on the theory of fairness. I would say that there’s a difference between fairness and equal treatment, but fairness and treating people as equals are much closer as notions.

Discover more about

our unequal world

Wolff, J. (2015). An Introduction to Political Philosophy (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Wolff, J. (2012). The Human Right to Health. W. W. Norton.

Wolff, J. (2015). Social Equality and Social Inequality. In C. Fourie, F. Schuppert & I. Wallimann-Helmer (Eds.), Social Equality: Essays on What It Means to be Equals (pp. 209-226). Oxford University Press.

Loneliness, disability and social justice