Loneliness, disability and social justice

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.

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.

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.

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.