The Second Objection: “Ought implies Can”

According to the second objection against the idea of justice as having a global scope, while not everything that is feasible must be realized as a matter of justice, all that justice can demand must be feasible. ‘Ought’, this well-known argument asserts, ‘implies can’ since we cannot be thought to have an obligation

37 4 _{See Aaron James, “Distributiv e Justice without Sov ereign Rule: the Case of Trade”, Social}

Theory and Practice 31(4) (2005): pp. 539-559, p. 538 and Darrel Moellendorf, Global Inequality Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrav e MacMillan, 2009), p. 47 .

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to aim for the impossible. As James puts it, “because general conditions of life limit what agents can do in practice, they limit what justice could require in principle.”3 7 5

Those who believe that morality regards the terms of our actual interactions think that this automatically leads to a limitation of the scope of justice. This is because some natural inequalities have causes or effects that we cannot compensate for. We cannot make the blind see or everyone happy in proportion to their moral merits – even though these would seem desirable goals to many of us. James accordingly thinks that the demands of morality must be sensitive to our capacities as human beings: “one is only owed something when an agent is capable of regulating this or her conduct as regarding that something, given what he or she can understand, plan for, and act on.”3 7 6 _{In this respect, it} becomes irrelevant if the pursuit of unattainable goals would also be expensive. The focus of this second objection lies on the futility of the efforts that aim at what is impossible. As Anderson argues, “principles of justice must be feasible, in the sense that agents are able to follow them.”3 7 7

So if we assume that in the ‘natural inequality’ scenario E it would also be impossible for the two societies to interact, on the interactionist view of morality this fact alone would suffice to prevent the natural differences in resources from becoming subject to considerations of justice. This seems consistent with Rawls’s claim that if a “situation is unalterable, [then] the question of justice does not arise.”3 7 8 _{The idea behind this second argument against the global} scope of justice is that we should not be held responsible for what we cannot

37 5 _{Aaron James, “Equality in a Realistic Utopia”, Social Theory and Practice 32(4) (2006): pp.}

699-7 24, p. 7 04.

37 6 _{Aaron James, “The Significance of Distribution”, p. 281.}

37 7 _{Elizabeth Anderson, “Cohen, Justice, and Interpersonal Justification”, p. 10.} 37 8 _{John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 254.}

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change: “if nothing can be done, there can be no injustice.”3 7 9 _{I do not owe you} an explanation or compensation for the fact that you are less talented than I am because I cannot compensate you for this inequality in talents. What I do owe you instead is compensation for your non-voluntary membership in a common institutional system that converts these natural differences into differences in affluence.

For practice-dependent views that accept the argument from the ‘ought- implies-can’ requirement, the scope of distributive justice becomes even more limited than it already is due to the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’. This is because the ‘ought-implies-can’ rule excludes from considerations of justice situations in which we deal with indivisible, man-made goods. The production of such goods might be morally demanded but we cannot appropriately reward everyone in proportion to the contribution they make it. This is usually the case with public goods like the traffic infrastructure or social services. All who can contribute to the generation of these goods should do so but not everyone gets out of these goods what they put into their creation. However, that is not a worry for interactionist views of morality as according to them we cannot be thought to have a duty to fairly divide such goods or to feel bad about disproportionally benefitting from them: since in these cases a fair division is not possible it cannot be mandatory for us. The ‘ought-implies-can’ rule has an important consequence for our thinking about what justice can maximally demand. It leads to a kind of realism about what is mandatory and restricts ideal justice to what is currently possible for us.

If practice-dependent writers are correct then the ‘ought-implies-can’ rule also applies within practices. This would cause the following difference between

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interactionist and practice-independent theories of justice. If something is currently unchangeable we now have no reasons for action to change the situation. However, only on the interactionist view, we also lack much reason for indignation or hope about presently unchangeable detrimental inequalities. Thus, if we can expect that (when we, for instance, keep on conducting research the way we do) we will sometime in the future be able to dispose of the means to eliminate such inequalities, then, on practice-dependent views, we have no reasons of justice to pursue such a development. Of course, also interactionists can regret harmful inequalities like natural blindness or accidentally-caused paraplegia. However, if they want to argue that we have weighty reasons to develop the means that would enable us to treat people suffering from these disabilities, they can do so only if they accept a more practice-independent notion of justice. After all, such inequalities are natural and furthermore currently impossible to remedy.

6. The Third Objection: the Implausibility of Wasteful Demands