In “The Idea of Equality” Bernard Williams tries to show that what appear to be trivial observations about equality offer meaningful support for egalitarian political programs (Williams 1973).
Nozick maintains that Williams’s argument is not as novel as it appears to be (Nozick 1974, 235–36). In the end, as Nozick sees it, it amounts to repeating a familiar claim, namely, that society ought to ensure that people have things they need.
Williams contends that two apparently trivial observations about equality actually have significant implications. The two apparently trivial observations are that all people are equally human and that there ought to be a reason for treating some people differently than others.
Williams argues that one thing that our shared humanity involves is a desire for integrity and that this desire is frustrated when a society inculcates false beliefs in its members that distort their choices and ways of understanding their lives. This criticism of ideology is a significant implication of the apparently trivial observation that all people are equally human.
The apparently trivial point that there should be a reason for treating some people differently than others gets some bite when you consider the reasons that are appropriate for distributing some classes of goods. For example, health care and higher education are distributed unequally: some people get them while others do not. Williams thinks that the nature of these goods tells us what reasons are appropriate for giving them to some people but not others. Health care should be distributed according to need while higher education should be distributed according to merit. A society that treats wealth as a condition of getting these things distributes them for the wrong reasons. The idea of equality requires that they be distributed for the appropriate reasons, namely need and merit, respectively. Again, he says, you get something meaningful out of what looks like a very uninspiring start.
Since this paper is very difficult, I posted a document titled “Read me first”. It goes over these arguments in more detail. You should read it first.
Nozick makes three basic points.
It isn’t true in general that things should be distributed according to their natures or purposes. Suppose I’m a barber. Maybe I want to cut hair to talk to people or (horrors) to make a living. Why do I have to use my skills to cut the shaggiest hair instead?
If Williams means that individuals are responsible for the distribution of goods, then the limits on liberty would be objectionable: doctors couldn’t demand money for their services, barbers couldn’t decide to cut only some people’s hair, and so on.
If Williams means that society is responsible, then he doesn’t have anything new to say. It’s just the assertion that society should provide for the needs of its members. (As opposed, say, to barbering or other inessential goods and services.)
Our discussion was mostly about the second branch, concerning goods that are not distributed equally. Here Williams’s central idea is that the distribution of these goods should be governed by what they are for. So, for example, health care is for curing illness and, as a consequence, it should be distributed according to need, that is, ill health. The purpose of higher education is to produce knowledge, so it should be distributed according to merit, meaning to the people who are most capable of learning.
You can distinguish between narrower and broader versions of his thesis. The broad version is that goods should be distributed according to their purpose. The narrow version is that the specific goods he listed have the specific purposes that he attributed to them.
Nozick challenges the broader point: he does not think that goods have purposes at all. His point is much more in the spirit of economic analysis than Williams’s is. Goods are for what people what to use them for and there is nothing else to say about the matter.
Most of our discussion was carried out within Williams’s framework, that is, taking up challenges to his narrower claims. So, for instance, Diya noted that there is a good case for thinking that health care can be for the improvement of our physical and mental abilities and not just for curing illnesses.
We had a lot to say about the purpose of higher education. I am just going to single out one comment, because I have some material to add to it. And otherwise I would be here all afternoon: you guys covered a lot of ground!
The comment I want to follow up on was made by Carlos. He said that one reason to doubt that the purpose of higher education is to produce knowledge is that the price of college education has gone up while the knowledge transmitted has, uh, not. Or, at least, it has not gone up as much as tuition has. By contrast, computers are a lot less expensive than they used to be and they do a lot more. You could reasonably say that the purpose of Apple Computer is to produce computing power and make it accessible to users.
There are two things I wanted to say about that.
First, Carlos has hit on an interesting theory in economics: Baumol’s Cost Disease. Baumol starts from the same observation that Carlos made. The price of some goods goes up without any improvement in quality. And the wages of the people who produce the goods also go up even though they are not more productive than their predecessors had been. That is the cost disease. College education keeps getting more expensive even though neither quality nor productivity is increasing.
It is not because your professors are lazy. It is because we cannot keep adding students to our classes while keeping the quality the same. Just as there are limits to how many people can hear a concert by a string quartet, we can only teach so many students.1
So why do our wages, and your tuition, go up despite our stagnant productivity? Because productivity in other jobs is increasing, meaning workers who have those jobs can earn more for a unit of their labor. That, in turn, means that college professors have to be paid more too. Otherwise, we would go to work in the jobs where productivity is increasing. So you should expect the cost of goods that are produced with technology to go down while the cost of services go up. A college education is a service, so the cost will go up even as the service remains the same.
The second thing I wanted to add was that the cost of college has not actually gone up as much as you think it has. The list price has gone through the roof. But there are so many discounts (“scholarships”) that the actual price has been flat over the past thirty years. Here is the short version of the story and here is the long version.
Why? This is what a former dean of the college said to me some time ago. When we raise tuition, demand goes up. She did not get into the reasons why this is so. You can speculate that people think that it must be good if we can charge this much for it or, conversely, that if we charged less than some of our competitors we would not really belong in the first rank. Of course, we might actually be charging less than our competitors at the end of the day, but no one can see that.
Higher education is a strange market.
Williams’s other point, about equality and the demand for integrity, got little discussion. We have touched on the basic idea at several points during the term. Adaptive preferences are the result of believing things that are false and egalitarian politics seeks to reverse them by spreading the truth.
Williams had class consciousness in mind. If you grow up thinking that lower class people are inferior to upper class people, you will not challenge the ruling class. And if you learn that the alleged inferiority is a myth, you will be more likely to advocate for your own interests.
That was the theory, in any event.
I think you can make a good case for thinking that the consciousness raising done by the feminist movement has been a much larger success than attempts to raise class consciousness have been.
Feminism was not even on Williams’s radar. You can infer that from the way he uses “man” throughout the essay without a second thought. (It was originally published in 1962.) That is one advantage of abstraction. Williams was thinking about one case, class consciousness, but what he wrote was abstract enough to apply to something else that he did not himself have in mind.
There was a handout for this class: 17.Williams.handout.pdf