Contributive Justice

Today is the Labor Day holiday in the United States. Our jobs are one of the ways in which we contribute to society as a whole.

In this spirit, I pass along some thoughts from the 2020 book by Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit. Toward the end of the book (pp. 206-213), he raises the idea of what he calls “contributive justice.” Sandel writes:

Economic concerns are not only about money in one’s pocket; they are also about how one’s role in the economy affects one’s standing in society. Those left behind by four decades of globalization and rising inequality were suffering from more than wage stagnation; they were experiencing what they feared was growing obsolescence. The society in which they lived no longer seemed to need the skills they had to offer. … [C]ontemporary liberals … have been offering working-class and middle-class voters a greater measure of distributive justice–fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth. But what these voters want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice–an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that goes with producing what others need and value. …

Sandel suggests that when economists focus on economic output and the distribution of income that results, they are leaving out important aspects of human flourishing. He writes:

People hold various views about what is important in life. We disagree about the meaning of human flourishing. … But all can agree, or so it would seem, that expanding the economic pie is better than shrinking it. Contributive justice, by contrast, is not neutral about human flourishing or the best way to live. From Aristotle to the American republican tradition, from Hegel to Catholic social teaching, theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make. According to this tradition, the fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life. The dignity of work consists in emphasizing our abilities to answer such needs. …

A political economy concerned only with the size and distribution of GDP undermines the dignity of work and makes for an impoverished civic life. … [P]rogressives largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising. … Go to college. Equip yourself to compete and win in the global economy. What you earn will depend on what you learn. You can make it if you try. This was an idealism suited to a global, meritocratic, market-driven age. It flattered the winners and insulted the losers. By 2016, it’s time was up.

Reading Sandel is always fruitful, because of the open and accessible ways in which he raises questions. I find myself nodding in many places, especially in his critique of the long-standing fallacy that that those who succeed in some way must have done so by outstanding merit–and moreover, that this merit can be generalized to other areas. For example, when a top athlete wins a championship or an award, the sportscasters often go in to little tizzy of exultation about how the winner “works harder” than anyone else or is “more competitive” than anyone else. The implication seems to be that the hardest worker and the most competitive person is also the winner. But of course, it’s virtually certain that there are, say, Olympic athletes who worked and competed harder than the winner–but had lower performance on the specific metric of that Olympic event because of difference sin factors like access to coaching and advice, access to financial, family, and social support, or genetics that shape body structure.

Whether it’s athletics or acting or business, success is often linked to certain types of personal merit, but the correlation is imperfect one. Moreover, maximizing performance and even merit in one area of human endeavor can often be associated with near-obsessive behavior, which has tradeoffs in other aspects of human experience. Just because someone is successful in athletics or acting or business, I don’t see any reason to believe that I should care about their opinions about, say, love, marriage and parenting, or about politics.

But while I’m broadly sympathetic to Sandel’s argument, I also confess that he can put my feathers up. For example, is it in fact true that (as Sandel writes) “we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good?” Words like “contribute” and “common good” are doing a lot of work here. If working at a paid job is a contribution to the common good, does this phrase mean that we are all “most fully human” when we are at work? In evaluating such a statement, I would want to know considerably more about who decides what it means to “contribute” and who determines what counts as the “common good,” and the extent to which I am allowed to disagree with the definitions offered by others. My sense is that for a lot of people, a job is just a paycheck, the most important parts of what makes them “fully human” happen outside the workplace–and they prefer it that way. I am not an ancient Greek, nor Hegelian, nor Catholic, so while I’m willing to listen and learn from Aristotle, Hegel, and Catholic social teaching, I’m not expecting to find myself in full alignment with those views.

I agree with Sandel that the dignity of work itself is not given sufficient attention. In the word of the poet Marge Piercy, “to be of use” matters. I occasionally like to quote the Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in 1844: “[W]hether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter, how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” But notice that Emerson’s view of the dignity of work is not about what Sandel calls “social recognition and esteem.” Instead, Emerson is referring to a person’s direct relationship with “honest work, done to thine own approbation.” When Sandel discusses the “dignity of work,” he is heavily focused on political economy, a somewhat nebulous idea of the “common good,” and the possibilities of “an alternative political project.”

There also seem to me to be hints of inflexibility and stagnancy in Sandel’s themes. Perhaps it’s true that (in Sandel’s words) “a political economy concerned only with the size and distribution of GDP undermines the dignity of work.” I’m willing to consider the proposition, although the word “only” is doing some heavy lifting here. After all, an enormous part of the real-world political economy already involves policy goals beyond size and distribution of GDP. But it might also be equally true that (in my own words) “a political economy concerns only with the dignity of work will undermine the size and distribution of GDP.” As an extreme example, if the United States had taken steps to assure that the “dignity of work” in agriculture was so fully supported 100 years ago that no change was needed, or that the “dignity of work” in manufacturing jobs was fully supported 70 years ago so that no change was needed, the US economy would not have evolved. The “dignity of work” or the idea of “contributive justice” shouldn’t mean that workers can just stay in the same role or industry forever.

But of course, Sandel knows all this. This short essay is only intended to highlight this idea of “contributive justice,” as a point of departure for further discussions. Perhaps the greatest sin on a Labor Day is not to take the time to appreciate all of those working and making contributions, whether paid or unpaid.