Exclusion, Injustice, and the Democratic State

...This is a case, perhaps, of a good person suffering undeserved pain—but this is divine, not human, injustice...

...It was the argument of my book Spheres of Justice that this participation (with a little luck...

...decisions about the number of school places depend upon a view of education...

...In fact, absolutism is rarely possible here...

...And then poor people, members of racial or religious minorities, heterodox men and women share only minimally in their country's good times, bear the brunt of economic decline, are shut out of the better schools and offices, carry everywhere the stigma of failure...

...Also in a more popular style—in the columns of local newspapers, on radio talk shows, and in everyday conversation—often thought to express nothing but egotism and meanspiritedness: but behind this too there is a view of justice, according to which everything has been done for "those people" that ought to be done...

...Excluded men and women get what they deserve, or what they have chosen, or they are the victims of bad luck...

...I want to make two arguments in response to this question: first, that the convertibility of social goods and the domination it makes possible take increasingly subtle and indirect forms in modern societies...

...The people who lose out in such transactions are those who can't afford to go to school or who depend upon the competence of public officials: they are pushed toward the margins of social life...

...The second group would be a lower class without precedent in human history: not enslaved, not oppressed, not exploited...

...The assignment of 56 • DISSENT responsibility is at stake here—with large consequences for social policy...

...And second, that given the continued existence of excluded groups, the state must play a larger role in advancing the cause of complex equality than I envisaged for it when I wrote about these matters ten years ago...

...The excluded are simply the class of men and women deficient across the range of qualities, so that distributive processes working autonomously, exactly as they are supposed to work, bring them no goods or no goods that they can profitably use...

...In any case, we do not now live in a society like that...

...the qualities that supposedly produce it (and that might give it legitimacy) are now its products...

...All the people, every man and woman, are or are supposed to be equal participants in all the spheres of justice, sharing, as members, in the distribution of welfare, security, wealth, education, office, political power, and so on—and also joining in the debates about what that sharing involves and how it ought to be managed...

...Young's argument is repeated today without its critical thrust...

...All of them are voters...

...In all these, and many other, ways we defend the boundaries of the spheres of justice...

...The triumph of equality, the democratic expansion of citizenship, turns out (on this view) to be a cruel hoax...

...who receives neither recognition nor respect from fellow citizens and suffers, as a result, from a loss of self-respect...

...What may be more important, divisions of class and gender cut across all these categories, so that there were in both Greece and Israel powerless members and powerful strangers: the formal rules of inclusion and exclusion did not determine the actual process of political (or everyday social and economic) decision making...

...who has been on the welfare rolls but was never enabled by the assistance he received to lead an independent life, a passive client of the state incapable of self-help or mutual aid, who is now pushed out of the system by (justified) budget cuts...

...Many of these people are agents of distribution, at work in welfare agencies or in school counseling offices or on admission and search committees or in political parties and movements...

...And so an insidious myth is born, a counter-myth to all the conspiracies, which holds that the remaining exclusions are no longer unjust, that they are indeed the unexpected product of justice itself...

...The reiteration is qualified by the nature of the goods at stake...

...Instead, the excluded mostly come in groups whose members share common experiences and, often enough, a family (racial, ethnic, gender) resemblance...

...We thus reproduce the internal exclusions of the ancient world: disenfranchised, powerless, unemployed, and marginalized members...

...Civil service exams and laws requiring "fair employment practices" open available careers to talented citizens, whoever they are—blocking the distribution of offices and jobs through a network of relatives, ethnic or religious kin, or "old boys...

...We have expanded the ancient understanding of citizenship and brotherhood, abolishing class and gender barriers, incorporating women, slaves, and workers, producing the modern, inclusive demos...

...A fixed determination not to accept any further responsibility for such people underlies, I think, the conservative social policies of the 1980s...

...She has not been treated like a foreigner...

...For the whole tendency of modern (welfarist or social) democracy, so we once thought, is to make the reproduction of marginality and exclusion increasingly difficult...

...Can it be our aim to create a society where the poor and the powerless have no grounds of complaint...

...And for their children, exclusion is an inheritance...

...Among ourselves, with our huge populations of guest workers and illegal immigrants, we have reproduced the old intermediate class...

...Has this person been treated unjustly...

...and, finally, who is probably not even saved, though salvation is the social good most readily available to him, at the hands of itinerant (or radio and television) evangelists...

...The public defender, the ban on bribery, and the new limits on campaign contributions protect the judicial system and the political process against the corruptions of wealth...

...Why, then, are we still so far from complex equality...

...Failure is not randomly distributed across the multicultural range of American society...

...Subtlety and indirection have nothing to do with their fate, for we have largely replaced the collective exclusion of women or workers or blacks or Jews with a new exclusion of individuals chosen, as it were, for the right reasons...

...Hence the only motive we have for helping those who fail is sympathy or humane feeling...

...participation in the different spheres takes different forms...

...Ancient Greeks and Israelites, for example, distinguished themselves from foreigners on relatively straightforward kinship lines...

...We don't quite know what to call these people—the dispossessed, the underclass, the truly disadvantaged, the socially isolated, the estranged poor— and this confusion about their classification reflects a deeper embarrassment about their existence...

...This is the argument that I need to address, but first it will be useful to provide a model description of one of "those people" as seen from the neoYoungian perspective...

...and so on...

...democratic politicians have labored, unsuccessfully, to "build a base" among people like her...

...And all these decisions are, in something close to a foundational sense, warranted and (partly) determined by an understanding of citizenship...

...Only when everyone is exposed to the harsh incentives as well as the golden opportunities of meritocracy and "free enterprise" will we know who the justly (or the not-unjustly) excluded really are...

...Defense is always necessary, since any socially significant good—money in a capitalist society is the obvious example—is likely to be convertible into all the other goods and so to serve as a medium of domination for those who possess it...

...55 distributive sphere would do better in another, and the result would be a horizontal and socially extended version of Aristotle's "ruling and being ruled in turn...

...Failure pursues them from sphere to sphere in the form of stereotyping, discrimination, and disregard, so that their condition is not in fact the product of a succession of autonomous decisions but rather of a single systemic decision or of an interconnected set...

...decisions about the scope of the market depend upon a view of commodities and entrepreneurial success...

...who is likely to do much more than a fair share of hard or dirty work...

...The myth of just or justified exclusion looks back, I think, to Michael Young's Rise of the Meritocracy, the classic dystopia of contemporary social science...

...Isn't this simply a sad story of individual misfortune and failure, with all the distributive agencies doing the work they are supposed to do, as best they can, and always in accordance with the principles of justice...

...This is true even if the decision isn't definitive, doesn't draw an absolute line between insiders and outsiders...

...The state—or, at least, the modern democratic state—must defend the values of complexity and equality on behalf of all its citizens...

...The old accounts of inequality and exclusion, focused on dominant goods and ruling classes, still carry a lot of weight, but they have tended in recent years to produce among excluded and marginal groups theories of systematic oppression, tales of conspiracy, that cannot sustain empirical analysis...

...Rather, different goods would be distributed for different reasons by different agents to different people—so that no single group of people would be dominant across the spheres...

...Public schools and meritocratic admissions policies guarantee the distribution of educational opportunities without regard to race or religion...

...No one would rule or be ruled all the time and everywhere...

...When I suggested that the contemporary use of 58 • DISSENT Efforts to expand markets and increase the number of jobs are similarly political, requiring decisions about infrastructural investment, tax incentives, foreign trade, and so on...

...who brings no skills or resources to the market, is only intermittently employed, displaying no entrepreneurial competence or energy...

...When third-world governments enlarge their own bureaucracies so as to guarantee jobs to college graduates, for example, they are aiming at political stability, not at any sort of egalitarianism...

...Religious toleration and cultural pluralism allow individual men and women to worship and live independently, unconventionally, without fear of political or economic penalty...

...personnel managers have attended to her talents or lack of talent...

...We have our own resident aliens, in but not of the political community, their rights and obligations as disputed today as they were two thousand years ago...

...In fact, active domination is less in evidence today...

...It has simply made visible what was once concealed by the false abstractions of gender, race, and class: the presence of men and women who cannot (or will not) meet the standard, or even the pluralized standards, of citizenship...

...no one else is responsible for their fate...

...I can imagine a social world in which such an account might have some plausibility, and I want to come back, later on, to the difficulties this might raise for the theory of justice...

...Hence the self-referential style of the essay—not the way I usually write...

...Land or money or political power or racial or religious identity (or some subset of these) become the means of access to the entire range of social goods...

...Universal entitlement programs preclude the use of welfare as a form of political patronage...

...No one would be radically excluded...

...There is little hope, in the third world or the first, of bringing such people into the mainstream of society unless state officials and active citizens make that their explicit goal...

...Those who can, do—barring bad luck, which is always someone's fate...

...The first argument deals with an overestimation of the justice of contemporary distributions, the second with an underestimation of the state as an agent of distributive justice...

...who lives in a fragmented family or altogether without familial support, alone, sometimes literally homeless...

...An individual in this situation can only complain, like Job, to God...

...Among ourselves, excluded men and women are not a random series of failed individuals, rejected one by one, sphere by sphere...

...My own claim that exclusion is still unjust has to be defended against this neo-Youngian argument...

...standing exactly where their own efforts (or lack thereof) had brought them...

...who has had a standard public education, up to the legally required minimum, WINTER • 1993 • 57 which was largely ineffective, never engaging either his mental or material interests...

...MW The exclusion of such people was probably less problematic than that of resident aliens...

...They will fall into two groups: those who work at low-paying jobs and survive on the social margins and those who can't or won't work and land in the safety net...

...The greater number of people whose attitudes and practices are represented along this continuum would certainly repudiate racism if they were asked, but their own habits, expectations, and unspoken fears carry, as it were, the residues of racial prejudice and constitute a significant social force—even if this is a force whose consequences no one intends...

...The knowledge that white supremacists are still politically active has some effect, I suppose, on the everyday life of black Americans, but what is more important in explaining their (partial) exclusion from the American mainstream is the continuum of attitudes and practices that starts with racism at one end and has a long way to go before it reaches to a thoroughgoing egalitarian civility or friendship at the other...

...It can't, then, be neutral or uncommitted with regard to the meaning of disputed social goods: decisions about the size of the bureaucracy depend upon a particular view of offices and their purposes...

...who has time to kill, being often out of work or (with good reason) in prison—but not much of the sort of time that we call "leisure...

...But the pressure, in order to be effective, need not take the form of organized and premeditated oppression —like the restraints that would be imposed on blacks today by white supremacists...

...democratic membership brings with it significant protections that no one is prepared to challenge openly...

...About this we must be careful, for it may well lead us to act unjustly, limiting the autonomous distribution of goods (as in cases of affirmative action or "reverse discrimination") and overbuilding the welfare system...

...The agents of autonomous distributions are effectively disempowered...

...N.B.: This essay was written for a conference on "Social Justice and Inequality" sponsored by the French Commisariat General du Plan in Paris in November 1992...

...Something less will do the job, as the black example suggests...

...Not that all goods would be distributed equally to all members: given the nature, that is, the social meaning and customary use, of the goods, equal distribution is neither desirable nor possible...

...All that humane feeling requires is humanitarian relief—a "safety net" so that those who are justly denied the most desirable social goods are not callously denied subsistence itself...

...Subordination and exclusion, it is said, are more the result of incapacity, apathy, or lack of interest than of domination...

...would give rise to a "complex equality" of members...

...But what marks a democratic political community is the recognition that all those social transactions that drive citizens toward the margins, that produce a class of excluded men and women—uneducated, unemployed, unrecognized, and powerless —are everywhere and always in the life of the community unjust...

...Given the attentiveness, what grounds of complaint can she possibly have for the exclusion...

...Inequality is always worked through some such medium...

...not excluded without first being attended to...

...Also, perhaps, against its libertarian variant, which holds that the last vestiges of domination won't be eliminated until we have curtailed the welfare system, deregulated the market, and given up affirmative action...

...deprived even of a cause to rally around...

...Individual members of excluded groups, thus protected, make their way forward or upward, winning at least a small share of social goods...

...Nor would it have bothered Greek philosophers or Jewish sages that women, slaves, urban workers, and "people of the land" (am ha-aretz)--even if they were native born and genealogically correct—had little or no say in the government of their communities...

...In it I respond to some questions prepared by the staff of the Commisariat, inviting me to reconsider aspects of my argument in Spheres of Justice (1983...

...Particular communities are constituted by the answers they give or, better, by the process through which it is decided whose answers count...

...But this is an ideal picture, a critical standard, describing how things would turn out if people actually joined in the distributive work and successfully defended the autonomy of the spheres...

...all of them hold in their hands or, better, in their minds and eyes the power of recognition...

...The other kind of exclusion, however, we at least pretend to have overcome...

...they have hardly yet been subjected to democratic control...

...64 • DISSENT...

...Imagine, then, a man or woman who is a citizen, a full member as this is legally defined...

...Social workers and teachers have tried to help...

...Failure in all the spheres is no longer the result and therefore the visible sign of oppression and injustice...

...People who fared badly in one WINTER • 1993...

...Groups like this take shape and reproduce themselves only under pressure...

...We can find it articulated (though rarely as openly as in Young's satire) in recent academic literature dealing with intelligence, crime, poverty, and welfare...

...Equality of opportunity, he argued, would divide society into two classes—those who are capable and those who are incapable of seizing their opportunities...

...But their political communities included, alongside citizens and brethren, an intermediate group of resident aliens, metics or ge'rim—not kin, but not foreign either, sharing some but not all of the rights and duties of members...

...nor would the possession of one good, like wealth or power or familial reputation, bring all the others in train...

...Many motives play a part in such decisions...

...who is politically powerless despite his suffrage, because he is numbered among those who need not be counted, a mass of unorganized, inarticulate, and therefore unrepresented men and women...

...State power dominates the sphere of office, and academic degrees displace actual qualifications...

...who is therefore unqualified for the places on offer in the civil service or the professions or in the institutions that train their members...

...What Young wrote was, in fact, a savage critique of meritocratic distributions in the absence of any sort of socialist solidarity...

...Inclusion begins with citizenship, which then serves as a value reiterated through democratic political activity in all the spheres of justice...

...Is that the definition of a just society...