OCT 24

18: OCT 24.

One way to promote altruism is Dillion’s strategy - give your money and maybe a kidney. But another way to assess altruism is at critical junctures in your life, such as between generations. Many of you are "behind a veil of ignorance" about your future wealth, so this might be a good time to sample your intuitions.

Imagine three futures for yourself. In all of them, you grow up to have a successful career, a family with two kids, and a medium size extended family. You are approaching retirement and your retirement and estate planning recalls a distant memory of an ethics class which talked about "justified partiality." You and your partner are wondering if you should leave all of your estate to your children or not. Remember, you will have access to this money until you die, so you could cover end of life care for yourself and your partner. Consider these three scenarios:

A. You and your partner retire with about 1 million dollars, a paid off house, and good health insurance.
B. You have all of the conditions in A, but 2 million dollars in net worth.
C. Same as B, but 8 million dollars.

For all three scenarios, assume that all indications suggest continued growth of your assets. You are also "aging well"!

In your group discussion, pretend you are actually making this estate planning decision. Would you give 100% of your estate to your kids and relatives in each scenario? What considerations come into the discussion? (Note: you could continue the options by imagining an estate with larger value - 16 million -- 16 billion.)

Our discussion of PPNs (personal preference networks) like the Alumni Association might help us think about another category of injustice, one supported by cultural processes.
Main Claim: Cultures allow humans to "normalize" claims that legitimate conduct not perceived as unjust, but later determined to be unjust.

Think of examples of cultural ideas related to justice that were considered normal, but have since been shown to be incorrect:

What's interesting about "cultural impersonal injustice" is that it involves a "normalization" a set of beliefs that support practices that, from hindsight, we don't just say that we have different beliefs, but that our predecessors were mistaken. (Something we wouldn't say, for example, about other cultural beliefs, like attractive clothing styles or art.)

An obvious example for US culture would be structural injustice against ethnic minorities that experience discrimination. If you are a formal rights theorist about justice, you might overlook or minimize the impacts on opportunity and success that come from “impersonal injustice”. Maybe an easier example to see this comes from Italian culture and the “problem of the south”. Overview of Italian attitudes toward the south, which still experiences lower socio-economic success. Northern Italians still normalize attitudes toward southerners that we now explain through culture and history. This allows them to explain lower SES in Sicily as a condition that contemporary Sicilians are responsible for. Likewise, we may underestimate the effect of disruptions of culture that come from slavery and discrimination in US history.

Now we have better ways of understanding different outcomes for culturally distinct groups. Compare for example Sicilian cultural experience and the cultural disruption that comes from slavery and discrimination.

Point: From the standpoint of a formal justice model, you might not see an injustice, but if you ask about differential life outcomes and capabilities for Northern and Southern Italians, you might see an injustice.

Capabilities Theory - approach to social justice that focuses on what people in a society can do or be. (This a short of material freedom - Sen's major work was Development as Freedom. Note how a development economist looks at things.) Rather than thinking about justice as fairness in the distribution of economic goods, capabilities theory sees the measure of social justice in a society in terms of how well they support basic human capabilities.

20: Capabilities are kinds of freedoms. They are both internal and external. (Example: Internal: Ability to ride a bike vs. External: having a bike and a place to ride it. "Combined capabilities" are both internal and external.

People don't only deserve to have their capabilities realized only if they are smart or can afford it. Capabilities theory takes in the range of "innate capabilities" that people have, including cognitive and other disabilities.

Capabilities theory isn't about "making" people function, but rather about giving people real options. A real option includes both the internal and external conditions for the capabilities.

26: problem of how to treat "options" that people might choose that damage their own capabilities: risky sports, drugs, selling organs.

29: Nussbaum adds a duty of dignity to the theory. This might help justify restricting options that are self-abasing (allowing oneself to be servile or live in squalor). With treatment of animals it might eliminate breeding of dogs against health, or banning cock fights or dog racing.

33: The List -- Health, Safety, Education, Social connection, Absence of fear or stress (note upcoming Sapolsky chapter on Stress and SES), Affiliation, recreation, autonomy.

Note how abstract this list is, but also how it would allow a social justice critique that wouldn't just be about income transfer (Rawls).