What's Fair?
Langan, John
Who gets what? WHAT'S FAIR? AMERICAN BELIEFS ABOUT DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Jennifer Hochschild Harvard University Press, $22.50,345 pp. John Langan LIFE, we have it on the authority of Presidents...
...All of her respondents were white...
...In the United States, at the present time, it seems to be getting less fair, as the federal government abandons programs aimed at lifting up the disadvantaged and as the country acquiesces in tax changes and contract renegotiations which will lift the burden of taxes from the backs of the rich and restrain the wage gains of workers...
...This may tell us more about the New Haven area than it does about the United States at large, and it indicates the danger in using Hochschild's people as a representative sample...
...They are also egalitarian about the political domain, especially on questions of right and authority...
...they were divided equally by sex...
...All the wealthy were Jewish or WASP...
...but it is reassuring to find cases where what isn't fair doesn't work either...
...The particular route she has taken in presenting the diversity of our beliefs and attitudes about distributive justice is to report a series of extended interviews with twenty-eight poor and wealthy residents of the New Haven area...
...The two departures from this pattern are in the direction of consistent equality or consistent differentiation across domains...
...John Langan LIFE, we have it on the authority of Presidents Kennedy and Carter and numerous pundits, is not fair...
...She insists both that there is little normative support for downward redistribution and that Americans have strong egalitarian tendencies which lead them to support government programs aimed at helping the deserving poor and at creating jobs and which cause them to resent low taxes for the rich...
...But in the economic domain, their judgments endorse differential treatment which rewards greater productivity and investment and which accepts the superior status of the rich as appropriate, even if not strictly merited...
...father JOHN langan, S.J...
...It would take a brave theorist to hold that only what is fair will work...
...Her objective is not to develop a sample for determining national opinion on various controversial public policies but to convey a sense of the complexity (often, indeed, the incoherence) of the beliefs of individuals about justice and of the ambiguity of their feelings...
...MICHAEL ZEIK teaches in the department of history at Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y...
...He is the author of several books, including Against the Self-images of the Age, and, most recently, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press...
...Jennifer Hochschild, a young scholar from Yale who is now teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, recognizes that the question that provides the title of her book troubles both truck drivers and coupon clippers and provokes answers that vary in emotional intensity and intellectual sophistication...
...She does warn us not to dismiss the variation across domains as evidence of inconsistency or ignorance...
...cript in 1980 should not have been surprised either by President Reagan's budgetary triumphs or by the subsequent wave of resentment and misgiving...
...She is modest and cautious in the political conclusions she draws from her rich and often poignant materials...
...john dominic crossan teaches Scripture at DePaul University in Chicago...
...Thus, people are egalitarian in their judgments about the socializing domain, which includes such sensitive topics as racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination and relations between the sexes...
...The value of her work is that she extends a bridge between the reflections of ordinary people on matters of justice and the large themes of political philosophy and public policy debate...
...Anyone who saw this manusREVIEWERS ALASDAIR MacINTYRE is Henry R. Luce professor in the department of philosophy at Wel-lesley College...
...The major conclusion that she draws from her interviews is that people's distributive judgments depend more on the domain of life that is being considered and much less on class position or general ideology...
...His most recent book is Cliffs of Fall (Seabury...
...This is something that she does very well, largely because of her ability to respond sympathetically to people of various backgrounds...
...is a research fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C...
...none of the poor was Jewish...
...The questions that this book explores are of pressing current interest, even though the book starts out with an examination of that hardy perennial, the question why there is no socialism in the United States...
...Hochschild actually gives more prominence to the different feelings of bitterness and satisfaction that the rich and the poor have about the way things work out in the various domains...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
