Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society

In thinking about the rights of workers versus owners, it’s helpful to distinguish two distinct aspects of ownership. The first are income rights, or “beneficial ownership.” The beneficial owners of a business have a right to any residual income or profits once it has met its commitments to workers, suppliers and so on. The second are control right

The result is a paradoxical sense of stasis—paradoxical because there is a real appetite for change; and, for better or worse, some kind of change seems all but inevitable.

And yet we are no more responsible for the talents we are born with than we are for our class, race or gender—they are the outcome of a “natural lottery” over which we have no control.[40] If we are bothered by the influence of class, race or gender on life chances, then we should also be bothered by the influence of differences in natural ability.

Properly understood, the difference principle is concerned not just with the distribution of income and wealth, but with the concentration of economic power and control, and with the extent to which people have opportunities for self-respect, including through work.

But it makes more sense to think of ownership as something that comes in degrees and entails a bundle of different legal rights, which differ depending on the nature of the item in question.

In philosophical circles, Rawls’s approach is described as asserting the “priority of the right over the good.” On this view, our rights define a framework within which we can each pursue our beliefs about how to live; in contrast to the alternative, where we start with a particular conception of the good, and design rights in order to promote it.

Rawls explicitly rejected “welfare state capitalism,” arguing that we cannot create a fair economy through redistribution alone. As we have seen, the difference principle is concerned not just with income and wealth, but with inequalities of economic power and control and of opportunities for self-respect; and this broad perspective, in turn, point

But whether people feel a sense of self-respect is also influenced by objective features of our social and economic institutions, including the availability and nature of paid work.

As Rawls put it, “Lacking a sense of longterm security and the opportunity for meaningful work and occupation is not only destructive of citizens’ self-respect but of their sense that they are members of society and not simply caught in it.”