Justice by Means of Democracy

Review

See my critique on TBinDC.

Notes

John Rawls throughout – see Zotero for Theory of Justice notes.

p24 Seeking alignment — >Contra Berlin’s argument that pluralism of values means inevitable conflict among them, analysis of real political choices would begin with the project of seeking alignment between the protection of negative and of positive liberties. Only after a project of pursuing alignment had been exhausted would one turn to debating a trade-off between these two categories of liberties.

p25 Moral powers — >… “The ancient and the modern liberties are co-original and equal weight with neither given pride of place over the other. The liberties of both public and private autonomy are given side by side and unranked in the first principle of justice. These liberties are co-original for the further reason that both kinds of liberty are rooted in one or both of the two moral powers, respectively in the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity for a conception of the good” (413).”/

(Quoting Rawls in Political Liberalism)

p31 Positive & Negative Liberties — >The autonomy is made real in our political institutions via the protection of both negative and positive liberties. Negative liberties are those rights of free speech, association, freedom of religion, and so forth, that permit us to chart our own course toward happiness, based on our own definitions of the good. Positive liberties and rights are those opportunities that we have to participate in our political institutions as decisionmakers, as voters, as elected officials, as people who contribute to the deliberations of our public bodies.

p37 Difference without Domination — >To be free from domination…is to be free from the prospect of arbitrary interference or “reserve control.” … To have freedom from domination requires more than just protection of the basic liberty to choose your religion, political party, associations, and employment. it also requires an equal share of control over the institutions—the laws, policies, procedures—that necessarily interfere with your life but that do so, ideally, only to protect each individual from domination by another, and any group from domination by other groups.

Q: Scarcity as domination?

p40 Role of Experts — “Experts are most valuable when they work hand in hand with a well-educated general population capable of supplying useful social knowledge to deliberations.” Footnote 14—cites commission report New Directions, re: Bioethics.

p53 Extant policies — >The standard of aspiring to achieve difference without domination does not necessarily generate a need for new policies or services. Instead, it requires a review of current policies across domains of social policy (transportation policy, housing policy, education policy, health policy, etc.) with a view to assessing how those current policies protect (or fail to protect) equal basic liberties. Where they fail either to protect equal basic liberties or to pass a strict scrutiny test for the achievement of difference without domination, then we have found places where we need to adjust our policies.

p55 Disempowering dependency, Allen is discussing economic egalitarianism — >This shift in focus—from questions simply of distribution to questions of the linkages between political economy and empowerment of citizens—helps policy makers see not only the best-off and the worst-off but also everybody in between. Relatedly, some efforts to fulfill the requirements of the difference principle, by directing material benefit to the least well-off, may simultaneously erode the political capacity of the least well-off specifically, and the democratic citizenry generally, in cases where disempowering forms of dependency emerge. In such cases, the principle of difference without domination would suggest that we should find an alternative path to fulfillment of our material needs, one that does not sacrifice political liberties.

Q: What is Allen saying here, that welfare could create ‘disempowering dependency’ ? Q: Whare are the other paths? Q: Welfare as erosion of political capacity. What is her source/citation for this suggestion?

p79 Washington & differences. Allen spends time here discussing Washington’s 1792 letter to Hamilton re: factions and the need for compromise. It assumes that the middle path is the right path.

Differences in political opinions are as unavoidable as, to a certain point, they may perhaps be necessary; but it is to be regretted, exceedingly, that subjects cannot be discussed with temper on the one hand, or decisions submitted to without having the motives which led to them, improperly implicated on the other: and this regret borders on chagrin when we find that Men of abilities—zealous patriots—having the same general objects in view, and the same upright intentions to prosecute them, will not exercise more charity in deciding on the opinions, & actions of one another. When matters get to such lengths, the natural inference is, that both sides have strained the Cords beyond their bearing—and that a middle course would be found the best, until experience shall have pointed out the right mode—or, which is not to be expected, because it is denied to mortals—there shall be some infallible rule by which we could fore judge events. Here Washington articulates the norm that robust polarization itself should generate a decision rule of selecting the middle course. Robust polarization is evidence, in his view, that neither side has found the right answer to the collective problem at hand. Consequently, they should forbear from pressing their case to a breaking point and settle for the middle course. This is the norm of forbearance named by Levitsky and Ziblatt. It is the idea that checking and balancing of power should be understood not just as something designed into the structure of institutions but also as a moral norm. Officeholders should check themselves as well as being checked by the rules of the game.”

My problems with this: - Begins from the assumption of a morally right and wrong side. - Begins from the assumption that problems are naturally dyadic. - Suggests, intentionally or not, that the “middle path” is what should win out in times of disagreement. Yet, this is arguably what has led to the United States drifting further and further to the right for decades, a settlement for a “middle path” that has migrated. - This “middle path” also does not imagine some issues to be of the nature of positive and negative liberties themselves. Think about gay marriage, abortion, gender-affirming care, climate change. There is no middle path for these issues.

p104 — three types of social ties: bonding, bridging, and linking.

p113 Strict Scrutiny — >More policies may be directly germane to basic rights protection than we often realize, and the standard of aspiring to achieve difference without domination requires us not so much to layer additional policies on top of the protection of equal basic liberties but, rather, to revisit the spectrum of possibilities for how equal basic liberties are protected in the first place. We need a principle of strict scrutiny. In other words, as we protect the basic liberties, we should choose modes of protecting them that align with the five facets of political equality discussed in chapter 2. Doing so requires study of policy domains not typically associated with basic rights protection.

(emphasis mine)

p114-115 lots of implementation stuff. Just a few highlights:

Mixed income housing is important, as are other policies that seek to roll back, or undo, the effects of “exclusionary zoning, persistent red lining, Selective withdrawal of public services, the segregation of low-income public housing, ‘stop and frisk’ policing concentrated in minority areas, school fudning tied to property values and the political fragmentation of metropolitan areas” (Sampson 2013; see also Rothstein 2015).

…we could increase the degree of bridging ties on college campuses, particularly elite campuses, by placing more emphasis on geographic diversity at the level of zip codes (Allen 2014a).

High-speed rail projects would provide great advances for social connectedness. The constant application of a design principle of social connectedness—defined as maximizing the rate of formation of bridging ties—to institutional design and design of the built environment should transform the relational context out of which groups and social patterning emerge.

Michael Reich and Ken Jacobs, also at Berkeley, argued for local minimum wages where wage policies cover work performed in the area in order to tie wages to local living standards. The localism lifts wages without reducing jobs and refocuses employers on their obligations to people across class lines within their own communities (Reich and Jacobs 2014).

By reorienting a theory of justice to protect positive and negative liberties equally, we bring into visibility policy aeas that have been largely obscured by twentieth-century liberalism’s incessant focus on taxation and redistribution—areas like housing, transportation, and labor. An underlying point of this book is that projects of justice require understanding the feedback loops and interactions among the political, social, and economic domains.

Emphasis on these all mine. Think about HACC voucher map. Q: How does the income localization mesh with the high-speed rail thing?

Also re: Implementation, p123. That page discusses leadership of a commission.

p116 social networks & institutional effectiveness — >In Putnam’s formulations, “social capital” refers to the resources that individuals develop through their social networks, and the private and public payoffs that those networks bring. We gain jobs through social networks, but also well-being and happiness. These are private goods. As to public goods, our communities benefit fom our social networks through their production of generalized trust, mutual support, cooperation, and institutional effectiveness (Putnam 2000, 21-22). In Putnam’s analysis, social capital is simply what arises from certain kinds of interaction: volunteering, participating in political campaigns, attending block parties and neighborhood picnics, and joining service and leadership clubs like the Jaycees and Rotary Club.

p152 Polypolitanism— >A polypolitan global membership system would maximize the freedom of labor to move by means of a framework that > >1. creates incentives for host citizens in nation-states to welcome migrants and migrant integration, and thereby avoids an increase to transaction costs in the receiving economy, and >2. draws on the resources of layered polity memberships, multiple affiliations, and multiple pathways to voice to ensure that migrants have access to political equality within receiving countries.

Table 6: Types of Egalitarian Economic Policy

What kind of inequality do we care about?	Stage	Preproduction	Production	Postproduction
	Bottom	- Endowment policies (health, education) - Universal basic income	- Minimum wage - Job guarantee	- Transfers (e.g., EITC) - Full-employment macro policies
	Middle	- Public spending on higher education	- Good-jobs policies - Industrial relations and labor laws - Sectoral wage boards - Trade agreements - Innovation policies	- Safety nets - Social insurance policies
	Top	- Inheritance / estate taxes	- Regulation - Antitrust	- Wealth taxes

**Source:** Closing presentation by Dani Rodrik, Harvard University, at the conference *“Combating Inequality: Rethinking Policies to Reduce Inequality in Advanced Economies,”* Peterson Institute for International Economics, October 17–18, 2019.

p178 community-based participatory regulatory process / styled after Community-Based Participatory Research. Allen doesn’t call it this, but that’s how I’ll refer to it. >In these domains, private-public partnerships support active project management, collaborative review, adjustment of milestones, peer assessment of local problems, and “new forms of collaboration with networks of extension experts.” Techniques of these kinds might be used, they argue, with place-based specificity, to help firms produce more good jobs and evolve their own firm practices in directions supportive of free labor. In short, the goal is participation-based regulatory processes in conditions of uncertainty. Firms’ development of capacity to participate in these rule-making processes would be another dimension of their evolution toward increasing democracy support.

One could argue that the HUD Continuum of Care program as a macro-intervention is at least a feint at this sort of community-driven rulemaking, though with wildly different styles of implementation and also subject to Executive fiat at times. However, in general, the CoC program emphasizes community planning, local decisionmaking, engagement of PLEE, and public-private partnership. That federal homelessness funding occasionally flows through the CoCs is only a component of the program as a macro intervention.

p185, re: Empowering Economy— >Finally, the ideal of an empowering economy ought to include a jobs guarantee, a form of stabilization of the economy in periods of economic contraction that avoids the erosion of skill and capacity, and therefore of empowerment, in the citizenry.

Q: How does a jobs guarantee interact with universal basic income? I believe Allen mentions this somewhere, though I can’t see anything in the index. Further, what are the limits of “empowerment” ? Empowerment is quite a buzzword in social work circles, but at what point does empowerment turn to abandonment?

p194-5, safety net vs stable floor— >But even under this egalitarian political economy, the patterns of distribution that flow from underlying arrangements of production will not escape the problem of those who would fall outside the structure of employment and, therefore, absent a foundation for flourishing, would fall below the threshold of material security necessary for political empowerment. This political economy, too, will need to secure a transactional welfare state, but the design of services should be understood conceptually as a second step after the design of the relational infrastructure. Moreover, the design should focus on providing a foundation for participation in economy and society—not a safety net in which to become entangled, but a stable floor, anchored by housing security, on which to stand and thrive. The goal is an economy organized such that the least well-off still have access to egalitarian political empowerment, and this means a foundation for flourishing through access to housing, transportation, education, and health. But it also means a system of employment and a market economy compatible with political agency and social connectedness. Thus conceived, we might develop a political economy aimed at securing freedom in its fullest sense—including not only private but also public autonomy, with both strands aligned with freedom from domination. This is a political economy for power-sharing liberalism.

Emphasis mine. I have many thoughts and questions. Q. Allen here centers employment, referring to it as “a foundation for flourishing.” I think this is an error. Employment is a structure for flourishing in our capitalist system, by which the only method for survival—not flourishing—is the selling of one’s time and skill. I do not think employment is bad, but I would not center it in a system searching for human flourishing. What can we consider the system? Allen calls it “a” system, can we then name several systems and seek to balance them, in a way mindful not to center employment and wage labor? Q: Safety net vs. stable floor. The current entangling and so-called dependence-encouraging nature of our welfare system is by design, specifically by design of corporate interests and conservative thinkers hostile to the responsibility of a State to provide the foundation upon which a citizen may build. Bill Clinton’s PROWA significantly imperiled the welfare state, strangled its ability to create meaningful change, and by orienting around the concept of “minimal assistance necessary” as a guiding rule to the non-profits that PROWA farmed this work out to, doomed multiple generations to bouncing between making not enough to survive without welfare, and making too much to receive welfare but not enough to survive.

p210, re: King & fulfillment of total capacity— >Like Du Bois, King places significant emphasis on positive liberty and is not satisfied simply with negative liberty. He writes, “I cannot be free until I have had the opportunity to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any artificial hindrance or barrier” (1986a, 121). Whereas liberals from Kant, Constant, and Berlin onward through Rawls focused on securing the negative liberties as a route to securing autonomy, their most prized form of human development, King seeks instead “the fulfillment of total capacity” (121), the chance to achieve one’s purposes, a chance that requires fulfillment in and through participation in human community (Allen 2018). … Full freedom, the fulfillment of total capacity, entails the absence of artificial hindrances or barriers to participation in that process. … This union of negative and positive liberties into a foundation for personal completion is what King means by the phrase “life-quality” freedom.

p220, re: housing policy— >How do we support development of this multitasking capacity? … Beyond this developmental question, the chance to engage in these activities also requires time. That means that an empowering economy will be one that secures people free time away from work to participate in their necessary civic multitasking. … Housing policy is important here too. Those who are rent-burdened often don’t expect to stay in their community for long, and therefore choose not to engage. Stable, sustainable housing situations are also necessary to support the multitasking needed for democracy. Ultimately, we need a virtuous cycle linking what happens in economic and social domains to support for citizens’ multitasking in the political domain.

Q: I think Allen misses the cause for why rent-burdened people don’t engage in community matters. Her stated reason, expectation not to be in community long, is not consistent with my experience. I think her first reason is actually why people who are rent-burdened often don’t participate: they lack the time. Not only time to vote or participate actively, but the time and the mental bandwidth to engage with ideas of civics.

p221, pursuit of one’s purposes— >The mistake here is to understand the practice of democratic citizenship as originating in self-interest. Instead, as I have been suggesting throughout, the relevant phenomenon that drives citizenly engagement is not interest but purpose. The goal should not be to pretend that people do not have interests or that they can shed them when they enter the deliberative assembly, as is suggested by the fifth theoretical model. Instead, we should start from the recognition that the point of civic and political engagement simply is the pursuit of one’s purposes. … The question is how to connect our purposes with those of others. This is the creative work with others that lies at the heart of meeting the relational challenge of rich integration.

p226, belonging & purpose— >As we participate in these processes, civic participants will get things wrong. They will insult and offend one another. They will dominate each other. To address this, we nee to call each other in, not out. We need to call each other in to the project of holding “thouness” toward others in our hearts. We need to strengthen the ethic of nonviolence and put it at the center of our politics. We need a culture not of blame and shame but of acknowledging fallibility and of calling one another in for course correction. That calling in is an act of invitation to a full sharing of power and responsibility.

Q: Not sure how to square this with people who do not believe some of us should exist. How to ensure safety alongside all of this? Very similar to my concerns around Allen’s general idea of compromise and middle paths, building from Washington’s letter.

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Allen’s Ideal & Design Principles

1. Political Equality
   1. Non-sacrificeability of negative and positive liberties
   2. Commitment to political equality
      1. Requirement for experiences of non-domination;
      2. equal access to the instruments of government, an equal chance to participate in decision-making within political institutions;
      3. Epistemic egalitarianism—any well functioning democracy needs to make good decisions based on good knowledge processes, that is, processes for gathering and sorting knowledge and making judgements on its basis;
      4. Reciprocity—the relational ethic that citizens have with one another: the ability to look one another in the eye, to propose the need for redress of grievances, and to be secure in the expectation that redress will be possible within constraints of reasonableness and rights;
      5. Co-ownership of political institutions.
2. Freedom from domination
3. Difference without domination

Subsidiary Ideals:

1. Egalitarian Participatory Constitutional Democracy
   1. Depersonalizing Power
   2. Inclusion—Power Sharing
   3. Inclusion—Aligning Natural & Actual Polities
   4. Energy & Republican Safety
2. A Connected Society
   1. Strict Scrutiny—we protect the basic liberties, choose modes of protecting them that align with the five facets of political equality.
3. Polypolitanism—any one of us might have affiliations with multiple political communities and many political roles, and that we need to form connections with any particular political community in ways that open us up to the possibility of embracing many other, nonoverlapping affiliations.
4. Empowering Economies
   1. Free Labor, Democracy-Supporting Firms, and a Good-Jobs Economy
   2. Investment in Bridging
   3. Democratic Steering

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