G.A. Cohen's "Why Not Socialism?" and the Camping Trip Analogy
Hello, welcome. We're continuing our discussion of distributive justice by looking at a piece by this philosopher right here, G.A. Cohen, also sometimes known as Jerry Cohen. We're looking at his essay, "Why Not Socialism?"
The Camping Trip Vignette
Here's where we're going to go. We're going to look at a little vignette or a thought experiment, as it were, what Cohen calls the camping trip.
Once we learn about what goes on at the camping trip, we'll see that two values are instantiated in it: equality and community. The idea is that when friends camp together, they share, they look out for one another. And even though everybody's not doing necessarily the same thing, it's all in the spirit of a collective enterprise of doing well together.
The further question that Cohen asks is: Are the values that we instantiate on the camping trip values that we could scale up, all the way to all of society? Could we treat all of our countrymen, as it were, as fellow campers and look out for them in the same way that we do look out for our friends when we camp? So the last question is going to be an exploration of the feasibility of a socialist system that instantiates these values.
The Camping Trip's Rules
Let's look at the camping trip. When we go camping, our common aim is that each of us have a good time, and we're going to do as far as possible the things that you like best.
We're going to have pots and pans and oil and coffee and fishing rods and canoes and a soccer ball and decks of cards and so forth. And as it goes on camping trips, we avail ourselves to these facilities collectively. So even if they are privately owned things—even if it's my friend Harry who brought the deck of cards, and even if it's my friend Sylvia who brought the cribbage score counter—me and my spouse can go play cribbage with their stuff, right? We can all avail ourselves to the facilities collectively.
Somebody's going to fish, somebody else is going to prepare the food, another person is going to cook it, and there might be people who hate cooking but enjoy washing up, they get to do the washing up. There are plenty of differences between people, but our mutual understandings and the spirit of the enterprise of camping ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.
The Market-Negotiated Camping Trip (The Alternative)
You could imagine a trip where everyone asserts her rights over the pieces of equipment and talents that she brings, where bargaining proceeds with respect to who is going to pay what to whom to be allowed, for example, to use a knife to peel potatoes, and how much he is going to charge others for those now peeled potatoes, right?
We can imagine a situation of bargaining where, in order to, say, use the deck of cards, I might have to pay a rental fee on them. Cohen makes this point: when we consider the two ways of camping, we might think of the standard way of camping of mutual sharing versus what we might take as the market-negotiated style of camping.
He says that when we consider the market style camping, most people would hate that, right? It's better to camp in a way where we are voluntarily looking out for one another rather than trying to bargain the collective goods that we share.
The two principles that underlie the good trip, the way that most people camp, are notions of equality and community.
1. The Principle of Equality
The first of these two principles that Cohen is interested in is equality, and he's specifically interested not in equality of result but equality of opportunity.
The camping trip doesn't require everybody to spend the same amount of time fishing, and it doesn't even require everybody to have the exact same food on their plates, right? But we should all have the same opportunity to find work that we like while we're on the trip, and we should all have at least a chance at getting some of the good things, food-wise let's say, as everybody else.
Cohen notices that equality of opportunity has been philosophized and understood and implemented in various ways, so depending on how you might think about equality of opportunity, you might focus on removing different sorts of barriers to equality.
A. Bourgeois Equality of Opportunity
The first thing that Cohen points out is that we might have what he's calling Bourgeois equality of opportunity. He says here what these sorts of egalitarians might be trying to do is they might be trying to remove socially constructed barriers on one's life chances.
Sometimes we can think about a socially constructed barrier in terms of life chances as a legal requirement (e.g., serfdom).
We could also think about, say, a racial prejudice that would also be a barrier that restricts your life chances.
This is the first kind of equality of opportunity, but Cohen notes that this isn't the kind of inequality that, once we fix this, everything will be fine.
B. Left-Liberal Equality of Opportunity
He says that there might also be disadvantages that come from one's circumstances. For instance, even if there are no legal requirements stopping you from advancing in society, and even if we've worked on things like prejudices, we might find that the bourgeois can still do really well in a situation where we're not focusing on disadvantages that come from one's circumstances.
We might think about the fact that some people are going to be born to parents with a lot of money; some people will be born to parents with very little money, right? And we might think that a person is going to have fewer opportunities in the sense that they won't be able to advance in the world of work and education if they don't have a good head start.
This sort of left-liberal equality is an attempt at what we might say levelling the playing field. The ultimate determining factor would be the amount of innate natural talent that a person has.
C. Socialist Equality of Opportunity (Cohen's Preference)
Cohen says that we could go even a step further. In a way, it's an injustice that a person might be born with fewer innate talents than another person. We might say that you don't deserve to be born smart or tall or good-look, or the opposite of any of those things, right? Cohen says that in that way, your undeserved inborn traits—the fact that some people do worse—isn't of itself for Cohen a certain kind of injustice.
If we were to correct against native differences in talent, we might say this: no matter what you're like, you're still going to do well in society if you put in the effort.
This is what Cohen imagines under perfect socialist equality of opportunity. We might redistribute some of the advantages that a person might be able to receive in society, and we might make sure that a person who, let's say, they're not as intelligent or not as productive as others, you might say, if they put in the same amount of work, they should be able to come home with the same paycheck.
We might equalize the hourly wage for everybody. People will still have an option of how much they'd like to work, so you could work 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week at the same wage, but no matter how special or productive you are, you're going to be making the same wage as everyone else. This would be a socialist approach that Cohen in fact favors because he thinks that this is true equality of opportunity.
Tolerable Inequality
As he notes here, your wage is the same, but you will have a choice to work a lot or work a little, and in this way Cohen is not saying that under his version of socialism everybody has to work the exact same and that everybody's going to come home with the exact same pay. In fact, he's going to allow that different people are going to have different incomes.
He says there are some cases where we will be okay, even under the approach of socialist equality of opportunity, to let some people choose more work with more income and others will prefer less income but with less work, right? Your preference about how much income you'd like and how much work you're willing to do in order to earn it, he says that we could leave that up to choice.
He gives an analogy here:
We would have equality of opportunity if there is a table strewn with fruit and you are told, "In your bag you can pick six pieces of fruit and take them for free." Now if everybody is able to come and make their choice of fruit, someone who takes five apples and one orange cannot, after seeing this distribution happen, raise a reasonable grievance against somebody who has more oranges. What would we say there? "Well, you had the option to get just as many oranges, but you picked apples," right?
So, there are some ways in which inequality is tolerable when it's based on voluntary tradeoffs that really just boil down to matters of taste.
He does say that we will also, under a socialist framework, tolerate certain kinds of differences in outcome due to effort.
For example, if you don't come for your fruit early enough, you may be left with the less good-look apples. If we've equalized the opportunity, certain kinds of effort might be a justifiable explanation of where the inequality came from.
The last thing we might notice is what Cohen calls option luck.
Let's say we are in a society of socialist equality, and I have $100 in my pocket, and you have $100 in your pocket. We both have gambling problems, so we decide to flip a coin, both of us putting $50 on line for it. Now, if I lose the bet, you will be left with $150 and I will be left with just $50, right?
In that case, Cohen says that this is what we might call option luck. It's a matter of luck that I lost the bet and you won, but because this inequality is traceable to voluntary choices, we would tolerate that inequality for Cohen.
In this way, he's saying that we should have equality, and what kind of equality are we talking about? We're talking about equality of opportunity such that no matter who you are and no matter what you like, you will have an equal shot at earning resources if you put in the work.
2. The Principle of Community
Here's the second principle of how the camping trip functions: the principle of community.
Here's how Cohen puts it: the principle of community requires that:
People care about and where necessary and possible care for one another.
Care that they care about one another.
It's this relationship of looking out for one another in a way that is as mutual as possible.
Cohen says that this is an important principle that can scale up from the camp in trip. Not only do we care for and look out for one another while camping, but in society we can also think about ways in which citizens might care for one another.
He says this:
We cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make and keep say 10 times as much money as I do, because a person making, you know, only $20,000 a year compared to the person who makes $200,000 a year, in those cases my life will then labor under challenges that you never face, challenges that you could help me cope with but do not because you keep your money.
Cohen sees it: wildly divergent incomes produce widely different social vulnerabilities, and in those cases those differences in vulnerability would destroy community when those who could attenuate the vulnerability are letting a person's lack of health care persist.
Communal Reciprocity vs. Market Exchange
What Cohen is looking for in a functioning society is what he calls communal reciprocity.
This is the non-market principle according to which I serve you not because of what I can get in return but because you need my service, and you for the same reason serve me.
We look out for one another for their own sake and we expect others to take our own well-being as their main motivator in looking out for us.
Cohen says that we do not see this when we look at how market interactions work. There is a certain amount of reciprocity within a capitalist market, but the interactions, while they are mutually beneficial, are not rooted in caring.
He cites Adam Smith:
The bread baker doesn't bake bread out of benevolence but out of a concern for his own well-being, which then thereby as a side effect does something good for all of society.
The way that Cohen sees it is that on this sort of market setup, the market is motivated by greed and fear rather than this mutual desire to serve.
In the market, what you're trying to do is buy things as low as you can, sell as high, and try to exploit the situation with the hand that you've been dealt as well as you can.
There's also fear that motivates our buying, selling, and working in capitalism because we worry that we will be made much worse off if we don't take the bar in front of us.
That doesn't seem like a genuine reciprocal mutual relationship of caring to Cohen. Again, think back to the camping trip: we don't negotiate from greed and fear at the camping trip.
Objections to the Principles
Objection 1: Need for Unequal Outcomes
Shouldn't we allow for more opportunity for unequal outcomes in our society? Shouldn't we make it such that some people could have more exclusive right to special goods on the camping trip and shouldn't we maybe set up society such that some people could set things up so that they have a higher wage so that through their efforts they could make a higher than average income?
Cohen replies:
This camping trip does allow for personal choice and different outcomes. It is true, for instance, that different people can choose different kinds of work, and there are even variable expectations on exactly what each person contributes. There isn't a requirement for somebody to catch a very specific number of fish, or there isn't a requirement that there is one person that has to do all the washing up.
He says that in the camping trip we are in this situation of mutual dependence that's also true in society at large, but in a society where there is inequality, this relationship of mutual dependence can sometimes be masked. Cohen is saying we are kidding ourselves a bit when we aim for inequality in society because it masks these relationships of mutual dependence that we have.
Objection 2: Scale and Feasibility
The camping trip might work for a small group, but when we try to scale up to all of society, it wouldn't be a desirable goal. We might say that you can only stand in these relationships of friendship and mutual care with a small number of people, not all people in your country.
Cohen says:
I sort of hear what people are saying here, but we're not asking about feasibility right now, we're asking about whether it would be good.
He says that the way that he imagines it, a world where we saw more people as neighbors or brothers or friends rather than competitors in the market or just strangers whose well-being isn't our main concern, he says it would be much nicer. He says it would be a wonderful world to see others as neighbors and friends. He even cites a folk song on this point. In that way, he's going to say that these should be attractive principles, at least they are attractive principles to him when he looks in his heart.
Feasibility: Market Socialism
We have the questions of whether the camping trip principles are desirable answered. We can now look at the question of whether these socialist ideas are feasible.
The first thing he's going to point out is that human motivation isn't the issue. Cohen notes that human beings and their motivations are a mixed bag: we do indeed have selfish motivations, but we should also notice that human beings do have genuine benevolent motivations.
Cohen notes that the current capitalist system produces wealth, but it produces this wealth through greed and fear. Not only is it bringing in low-quality motives to get a good result, but there are also bad results that come out of capitalism, in the process of some workers being left behind in cases where their labor is no longer valued by the capitalists who might buy that labor.
Capitalism has succeeded in being productive; socialism has less so found successful strategies in that realm.
Market Socialism (Joseph Carens)
Cohen points out that some economists and political scientists have started to try to work out systems trying to imagine how we might be able to realize these socialist ideals at a broader level. This notion of what's called Market Socialism comes from Joseph Carens.
Imagine we have managers who own no capital. The corporation they're running is owned by all the people in the state, but each of the corporations is going to compete within the marketplace. This idea of market competition will keep prices low, keep innovation moving ahead, and it will help to increase productivity and the quality of our products, as we would see in a capitalist system.
But then we imagine—and this is how it's not just a marketplace but Market Socialism—after the market does its work and profits are generated, a tax would be levied, and it would make sure that a worker is making the same much as a manager, and somebody from a successful company is going to come out with just as much as someone from a less successful company.
This approach we could call Market Socialism because there is a marketplace that's generating rewards and profit and it's keeping up productivity and keeping prices low, and all that kind of stuff that we see in capitalism, but we socialize it by equaling out income inequalities in the end.
Cohen's Concerns with Market Socialism
While some thinkers have been very impressed with this idea of Market Socialism, Cohen is a bit concerned because he says that a market in Market Socialism would still threaten the kind of equality that he's interested in.
Threat to Equality: He's worried that under a Market Socialist system, even when we have these equalizations of tax revenues, we might have certain kinds of inequality still. We might find situations where a person who continues to be a part of successful companies ends up having more opportunity to bargain for more resources, to find a cushier or easier job, and to also find ways of using their advantage to put more money in their pocket. If we have a system of winners and losers, which would emerge within a market system, that in and of itself would threaten equality.
Threat to Community: Our value of community could be threatened because, as we remember, mutual reciprocity is caring for one another for the sake of caring for one another, whereas market exchanges are motivated primarily by greed and fear according to Cohen. If we have market exchanges motivated by greed and fear, then we wouldn't have taken all the bad things about capitalism out of this system.
Conclusion: Beyond Predation
Cohen says that we should be thinking about how we can organize our society in a way that's based on genuine reciprocity. He says that we do actually see this in some parts of the working world in spite of capitalism, specifically in fields like healthcare and education.
A healthcare worker isn't thinking about whether to serve a patient on the basis of whether that patient can make them money, but instead many healthcare workers—and many educators—are going to try to do their job well and they will work hard because they see the value in the work that they're doing. Cohen says that's the sort of motivation and sort of institutional structure that we can think about finding ways of scaling that up into a larger picture of a Cooperative Society based on community and equality.
Cohen ends the essay by saying that every market, even on a socialist attempt, is a system of predation. That's his problem with Market Socialism: there is still this predatory practice of doing all you can to always buy low and sell high and exploit the vulnerabilities of another in a transaction. He's very willing to admit that previous Communist governments have been atrocious, both in terms of their productivity and their violations of human rights, but he's saying, "I do not think that the conclusion is to give up."
Part of what Cohen is up to here is he's trying to imagine in what ways can we arrange our social technology, how can we reimagine society in a way where the small scale values of the camping trip could be society-level values that we all live by and hold one another to.
Thanks for listening and take care.
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