Relationships of Equality: A Camping Trip Revisited

G. A. Cohen incisively argued that our judgments of social justice should fit our convictions about how to interact with others in our personal lives. Ironically, the ordinary morality of cooperation invoked in his last book undermines his favored principle of equality, and supports John Rawls’ reliance on a relevantly impartial choice promoting appropriate fundamental interests as a basis for distributive standards. His further objections to Rawls’ account of distributive justice neglect the role of social relations in establishing the proper scope of that impartiality and the moral force of Rawls’ taxonomy of non-ideal societies. In contrast, the powerful evocation of goods of community at the end of Cohen’s last book points to a genuine inadequacy. Conscientious fellow-citizens must take account of the impact of their political choices on options for sharing and caring. In finding a proper balance between these goods and competing individualist concerns, the original position is of too little use to sustain Rawls’ assessment of his conception of justice as complete. In the face of our strong moral convictions about how to live together, both Cohen’s luck egalitarianism and Rawls’ barriers between aspirations to community and political choice must give way.