THE
PUSHPIN PUNDIT
Ronald Dworkin’s Utilitarianism
(posted July 2, 2006)
When
would Ronald Dworkin provide less compensation to a person with a greater
disability, while providing more compensation to a person with a lesser
disability?
Short
answer: When utilitarianism would do so,
since Dworkin’s system of “hypothetical insurance” is essentially a form of
utilitarianism. See Chapter 7 of my book
Distributive Justice and Disability:
Utilitarianism against Egalitarianism.
Long and roundabout answer:
Last
semester I taught Will Kymlicka’s excellent textbook, Contemporary Political Philosophy.
Kymlicka is fair to utilitarianism, but utilitarianism is not his
favorite theory of distributive justice; in fact, it is not even his
second-favorite theory. Kymlicka
believes that Rawls improves on utilitarianism, and that Dworkin improves on
Rawls.
Kymlicka endorses Dworkin’s principle
that (to simplify) unchosen disadvantages should be compensated. Kymlicka also endorses the means by which
Dworkin proposes to effect compensation, the system of “hypothetical insurance.” There is a problem, however: Dworkin’s hypothetical insurance reaches
results that are inconsistent with the principle of compensating for unchosen
disadvantage. Kymlicka realizes that
hypothetical insurance is not really the same as compensating for unchosen
disadvantage, but he fails to realize how much daylight there is between the
two; he fails to realize that hypothetical insurance is in fact a return to
utilitarianism.
In
setting compensation for disability, the system of hypothetical insurance asks
the following question: To what extent
would people insure against various kinds of disability, from a situation of
equal material resources, assuming that they knew the frequency of disability
but did not know whether they themselves were or would become disabled? The average level of insurance coverage that
hypothetical insurance buyers would buy for a disability then becomes the
actual level of compensation for that disability.
Suppose
a painful disability, D1, that affects one out of
every 1,000 people. A treatment is available
that will completely and permanently alleviate the pain, but it is very
expensive: the cost of the treatment is twice the initial equal share of
resources. Presumably, hypothetical
insurance buyers would buy enough insurance so that they would be able to
afford the pain-relieving treatment if they happened to have the D1 disability
when the veil of ignorance was lifted.
(The cost of this insurance would be approximately .002 times the
initial share of resources.)
Now
suppose another disability, D2. This
disability also affects one out of every 1,000 people, and it is even more painful than D1 (though it does not
prevent people from working).
Unfortunately, there is no current treatment for D2, and there is very
little likelihood of ever finding a treatment.
Presumably, then, hypothetical insurance buyers would insure against D2
at a far lower level of coverage than
against D1: as there is no treatment for
D2, compensation for that condition would be far less beneficial.
It
is theoretically possible, of course, that hypothetical insurance buyers would
insure against D2 at a higher level
of coverage than against D1; maybe insurance buyers would take an attitude of
maximum risk-aversion, and would seek to make their worst-off state (D2) as
good as possible. But in considering
Dworkin’s system of hypothetical insurance, we are likely to assume that
hypothetical insurance buyers would not be maximally risk-averse (and by “we” I
emphatically mean to include Dworkin himself).
So
Dworkin’s system would provide far less compensation to people with a greater unchosen disadvantage
(disability D2, which is more painful), and would provide far more compensation
to people with a lesser unchosen
disadvantage (disability D1, which is less painful but is treatable). Dworkin would provide far less compensation
to people who are worse off, and far
more compensation to people who could benefit
more. This is not egalitarianism,
but rather a kind of utilitarianism.
It
is because Dworkin’s hypothetical insurance is a kind of utilitarianism that
Dworkin can achieve an intermediate position on compensating the disabled,
avoiding the extremes of zero redistribution and virtually unlimited
redistribution.
There
are many complications to Dworkin’s theory, and I have glossed over them in
this post. So I repeat what I said in
the Short Answer: See Chapter 7 of my
book.
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