In the last section we explored a suggestion that Rawls can incorporate wealth inheritance into his conception of social class to coherently justify restricting wealth inheritance to the opportunity and luck intuition. This leads us to consider how Rawls can respond to the contention that his theory is not actually justifiable to those who hold the luck intuition even after his principles are implemented. This is the central contention of the Structural Injustice Problem. This problem is that it appears Rawls defines the scope of his theory too narrowly to account for the ways individuals suffer from states of affairs they cannot control or have not chosen. This is significant because if Iris Young’s argument is left unanswered it shows Rawls does not answer the normative concerns of those who hold the luck intuition with enough strength. In turn this would mean Rawls’s restriction
of wealth inheritance was not broadly justifiable and impartial towards the three conflicting intuitions.
Those who hold the luck intuition will disagree with Rawls’s principles as a guide for just action. This means individuals will not only disagree on how to restrict wealth inheritance under Rawls’s theory, they will also dis-agree about his principles of justice. They will disdis-agree because Young’s argument entails that wealth inheritance is one way in which social be-haviours can perpetuate and be disadvantageous to an individual without their choice. This is contrary to the intuitive normative judgement of those who hold the luck intuition, namely that the role of luck in people’s lives should be neutralised.
The striking question that follows from Young’s argument is: what are social behaviours and why do they matter once Rawls’s normative princi-ples and conception of background justice is implemented? Young (2001:
70) argues that social behaviours are “structural processes” that reflect what a society values and what is a culturally and socially endorsed way of life. Young suggests that the subject of Rawls’s principles are too nar-row because they apply only to a basic legal and economic framework that governs individual interactions. For Young the subject of justice should be broader, it should include the interactions themselves. As Young (2011:
70) says:
Depending on the issue, the structural processes that tend to produce injustice for many people do not necessarily refer to a small set of institutions, and they do not exclude everyday habits and chosen actions.
I believe we can consider wealth inheritance as one kind of chosen action or everyday habit that reflects a social value for accumulating capital and be-queathing it for future generations. In Chapter 2 I used a modified version of Young’s example of Sandy, who is forced into homelessness, to illustrate what Young’s argument entails for wealth inheritance. In the example I compared the case of Sandy and Sandra. Sandy is a mother of two who
works in a male dominated field for a less than average wage. As a result she finds herself choosing between housing that is inadequate for raising two children or homelessness. On the other hand, Sandra who is as tal-ented and motivated as Sandy in the relevant ways inherits a vast amount of wealth which is restricted through taxation to pay for welfare policies that help Sandy. Nevertheless, Sandra’s inheritance is not restricted com-pletely because it would not be of the greatest benefit to Sandy’s social class.
Young’s argument is that even though Rawls’s principles are applied coherently, it still seems unjust for Sandy to have fewer choices in life than Sandra. Sandy is not the victim of one recognisable immoral act, but she simply does not value wealth accumulation and bequeathing to the same extent as Sandra. In fact Sandy’s valuing of her children’s education and adequate housing is probably not something particular to Sandy, but common to many in her situation. If Sandra was in Sandy’s situation she would also value her housing and children’s education higher than accumulating and bequeathing capital.
Despite the restriction of Sandra’s wealth inheritance, it appears that Sandy is at a disadvantage because her values are contrary to the values of her society. She is not a male breadwinner and does not have enough savings to own a home. It seems that Young’s argument entails that a just society should not treat wealth inheritance as a social value of capital ac-cumulation and property transfer that excludes individuals with different values from having the same choices as others. None of this is to say that Rawls is unaware of the effects of wealth inheritance. But only that, con-trary to Young (2001: 70), he does not include the “patterns in relations among people and the positions they occupy relative to one another” when some individuals inherit wealth and others do not, within the basic struc-ture. At this point those who hold the luck intuition can reasonably object that what Young’s argument shows is that Rawls’s theory can still permit lucky events like wealth inheritance to limit Sandy’s opportunities in life
without her choice. This objection seems to suggest that Rawls’s theory does not answer the normative concerns of the luck intuition because it permits wealth inheritance to determine the choices open to individuals.
It seems that if we take Young’s argument about structural processes seriously, then the most theoretically economical response from Rawls is to offer a slightly different interpretation of the basic structure. To that end Rawls could include individual behaviours that contribute to a collective behaviour of valuing wealth accumulation in his conception of the basic structure of society. This would mean that the social processes that lead to a society valuing capital accumulation and male breadwinners above affordable housing or female breadwinners should be reshaped so they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. One way to achieve this is by restricting wealth inheritance further so it does not perpetuate soci-ety’s valuing of capital accumulation above other types of everyday habits.
Another way might involve restricting the use of inherited wealth to an individual’s desires about one’s own life. This would exclude wealth inher-itance from playing a role in funding philanthropy or political parties or other activities that allow structural processes and social values to emerge out of individual choices and individual labour.
Nevertheless, the suggestion to include wealth inheritance as a social behaviour in the basic structure would be motivationally incoherent. This is because Rawls’s motivation for defining the basic structure of society as social institutions is to avoid a case by case moral judgement of individ-ual behaviours and aggregate social behaviours. As Rawls (2001: 10–12) clearly states:
We view justice as fairness not as a comprehensive moral doc-trine but as a political conception to apply to that structure of political and social institutions.
No attempt will be made here to deal systematically with local justice.
Rawls’s theory avoids what he calls “local justice” or prescribing the just
internal relations of associations and individual transactions. To then in-clude wealth inheritance as an act that reflects a social value for accu-mulating capital and bequeathing seems contrary to Rawls’s motivations for a unified general theory of distributive justice. Even to include a few unplanned individual behaviours that are disadvantageous because they run contrary to the everyday habits of some individuals is contrary to Rawls motivations. For example, a society would consider market fluctu-ations that cause homelessness or unemployment as unplanned individual behaviours that are caused by collective social behaviours in the market.
Rawls’s theory can then mitigate the effect of unplanned behaviours by insisting that the intentions of the second principle of justice is to counter social contingencies. Nevertheless, even this small departure from Rawls’s theory is motivationally incoherent with the first principle of justice and Rawls’s conception of pure procedural justice. The motivation for Rawls’s principles is the idea that they will be arrived at through a widely ac-ceptable process of fair and impartial deliberation. This process does not permit cherry picking certain social behaviours that we judge to be obvi-ously unjust or immoral.
Furthermore the example I use is not a rare case about a highly im-probable scenario. It is a comparison of two individuals; one who benefits from her society’s valuing for accumulating and bequeathing capital and another who is priced out of the housing and labour markets by it. The example is within Rawls’s framework of a property-owning democracy and the social conditions prior to the acceptance of the principles of justice. To include particular individual behaviours that are caused by wealth inher-itance within the basic structure of society, would necessarily violate the first principle of justice. This is because Rawls’s theory would have to curb the equal basic rights of some citizens to dispose or accumulate wealth to avoid the type of unplanned individual behaviours that worry Young.
So what can be said in response to the Structural Injustice Problem?
One response that Rawls can make is that the Structural Injustice Problem
does not suggest his theory completely ignores the concerns of the luck intuition. Rather the problem only suggests that his theory might not answer the concerns as strongly as initially thought. I will discuss this response in further detail and its costs and benefits in Chapter 5. For now it is safe to assert that Rawls’s theory will have some difficulty in responding to the Structural Injustice Problem. This leads us to assert that Rawls cannot answer the normative concerns of the luck intuition with sufficient strength to justify restricting wealth inheritance equally to all three intuitions.