On The Least Of These

Redistribution of wealth is a phrase that is coded for use as a weapon in the American political war between right and left: use it favorably and you must be a socialist liberal pinko commie who wants to steal money from those who worked for it and give it to lazy homeless people who didn't; use it unfavorably, and you must be an uneducated redneck gun carrying republican too stupid to understand enlightened values.  It's unfortunate when words, phrases and the ideas they represent get co-opted like that by the political polemic, since it usually means any thoughtful consideration or honest conversation of them has come to an end.

Just as well, today's reading brings up the morality of wealth redistribution.  From The Case Against Perfection by Michael Sandel.  First you need to understand Sandel's idea of "giftedness."

But striving is not the point of sports; excellence is.  And excellence consists at least partly in the display of natural talents and gifts that are no doing of the athlete who possesses them.  This is an uncomfortable fact for democratic societies.  We want to believe that success in sports, and in life, is something we earn, not something we inherit.  Natural gifts, and the admiration they inspire, embarrass the meritocratic faith; they cast doubt on the conviction that praise and rewards flow from effort alone.  In the face of this embarrassment, we inflate the moral significance of effort and striving, and depreciate giftedness (p.28)

So success does not always flow exclusively from your hard work, but is based as well in your own natural giftedness.  What are the implications of that?  He argues later:

Why, after all, do the successful owe anything to the least advantaged members of society?  One compelling answer to this question leans heavily on the notion of giftedness.  The natural talents that enable the successful to flourish are not their own doing, but, rather, their own good fortune -- a result of the genetic lottery.  If our genetic endowments are gifts rather than achievements for which we can claim credit, it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty they reap in a market economy.  We therefore have an obligation to share this bounty with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts (p.91).

So there you have it: wealth distribution is a moral necessity because the means by which we gained that wealth were not of our own doing but were natural gifts that we inherited by fluke, and so it would be wrong to keep that wealth from those who did not benefit from the same fluke.

The conclusion is nice because it offers an outcome that feels fair and just, but does the argument hold?  It has potential, certainly, but there is something incomplete about it.

Let's accept his premise that success is in part due to our naturally inherited gifts and not solely based on our own effort.  Does that premise establish the necessity of sharing my success with the poor?  Sandel argues that "it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty" and to that extent he is correct.  But agreeing that we should not assume something only means that we should have some more in depth discussion and reflection before accepting the conclusion, not that the conclusion must necessarily be denied.  Sandel's premise does establish that we should not presume the conclusion, and does make discussion and reflection a necessity, but it does not make rejection of the conclusion a necessity.  Despite that, in the very next line he proceeds as if his premise did in fact establish just such an obligation: "We therefore have an obligation..."   It does not, though, and that is the first thing that is missing from his argument.

So from where does that necessity come?  On what grounds must I share the success that I accrue through my natural gifts?  Why should I think that I am not entitled to the wealth created by my own giftedness?  A good argument could be made that you can claim credit for your natural gifts, and that their nature as gifts does not diminish your entitlement to profit from them.  For example, I may have received those skills and abilities by gift, but I still made the choice to exercise them.  And not just that choice, but I am still the one who made all the many previous choices in my life that brought me to a point where I was in a position to exercise them.  After all, even the most gifted of runners could have chosen to spend their life in front of the TV.  Doesn't that choice entitle me to claim at least some credit for the successful deployment of my gifts?

Reasoning and argument alone, therefore, cannot get us to a place where we have a moral obligation to share our success with the poor.  That obligation comes only from the moral revelations of God.  It is God who gives us that command, God who creates that imperative.  Theology shamelessly fills the gap. 

A second thing missing from Sandel's argument is a consideration of the other parts of our success.  Yes, some amount of our success is attributable to our natural gifts rather than our effort, but other parts of our success do spring from our own hard work and determination.  I am a very gifted professor, but that has yet to successfully land me a job; with over 100 rejected applications so far, if I do get one it will not be because of my gifts but because of my own determination and refusal to give up.  So what do we do with the wealth that does come from our own hard work and effort?  Is it a case where we have to share the wealth that comes from our gifts but get to keep selfishly that which comes from our work?  Obviously not.  Besides being impractical, the distinction is stupid.  But can a reason be given why we must share the bounty of our efforts?  Yes, and that reason, while similar in logic to Sandel's argument, looks outside rather than inside your person: it is based on society.  Simply put, all your good efforts wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if not for the social structures that we have in place that allow your efforts to be profitable.  All of the market infrastructure, the readily available manufacturing sector, the commercial complex, the labour pool, and everything else that is necessary to carry your efforts from wishful intentions to profitable enterprise -- those are all things that do not belong to you, but are created by and belong to the whole of society.  And you can know this to be true simply by pondering how successful Donald Trump would be had he been born to nomadic natives in the heart of the African jungle.  Since it was society's infrastructure that enabled the success of your efforts, then it is to society that at least part of the proceeds of your efforts is due.

Thus are the foundations of the moral necessity for the redistribution of wealth.