I want now to consider the second objection, namely the claim that any patterned distribution, and most particularly the patterned distributions of radical egalitarianism, would require such continuous and massive state intervention that it would undermine individual liberty and the moral autonomy essential for the good of self-respect.
This objection uncritically makes all the background assumptions of laissez-faire capitalism—a social order which has not existed for a long time and probably could not exist in our contemporary world. But, a society committed to radical egalitarianism would also be a genuinely socialist society and would have very different background conditions. The objection just unrealistically assumes a genuinely free market society where people are busy possessive individualists devoted to accumulating and bargaining and are concerned very centrally with protecting their private property. It simply assumes that human beings, independently of the particular type of socialization they have been subject to, have very little sense of or feeling for community or cooperativeness, except in the form of bargaining (again the free market being the model). But a society in which radical egalitarianism could flourish would be an advanced socialist society under conditions of moderate abundance. People would not have a market orientation. They would not be accumulators or possessive individualists and the aim of their economic organization would not be profit maximization but the satisfaction of the human needs of everyone. The more pressing problems of scarcity would have been overcome. Everyone would have a secure life, their basic needs would be met and their level of education, and hence their critical consciousness, would be much higher than it is now, such that, in their situation, they would not be committed to Gomper's dictum of "more." Furthermore, the society would be thoroughly democratic and this would mean industrial democracy as well as political democracy. That would mean that working people, where every able bodied adult would be a worker, would control—collectively control in a fair democratic manner—their own work: that is the production relations would be in their hands as well as the governmental functions of the society, which in this changed environment would have become essentially administrative functions. In fine the institutions of the society and the psychological motivations of people would be very different than those implicitly appealed to in the objection. Under these conditions, the state, if that is the best thing still to call it, would not be the instrument of class oppression and management that it now is. People would democratically manage their own lives and the design of their society in a genuine gemeinschaft so that there would not be the question of an instrument of class domination interfering with people's liberties. People would be their own masters with a psychology that thinks in terms of "we" and not just, and most fundamentally, in terms of 'I', where the protection of my rights is the crucial thing. Moreover, now the society would be so organized that cooperation made sense and was not just to avoid the "state of nature." The society would be a secure society of relative abundance. (Communism and radical egalitarianism are unthinkable in any other situation.) It would be a society in which their needs were met. Since the society would be geared, within the limits of reasonable growth, to maximize for everyone, and as equally as possible, the satisfaction of their needs, a roughly egalitarian pattern would be in a steady state. It would not have to be constantly tinkered with to maintain the pattern. People would not, in such a secure situation have such a possessive hankering to acquire things or to pass them on. Such acquisitiveness would no longer be such a major feature of our psychologies. Moreover, given the productive wealth of the society, there would be no need to worry, if in practice distributions sometimes swayed a little from the norm of equality. Everyone would have plenty and have security; people would not be possessive individualists bent on accumulating and obsessively concerned with mine and thine. There would, moreover, be no way for anyone to become a capitalist and exploit others and indeed there would be precious little motivation to do so.
If in spite of this an elite did show signs of forming, there would be, firmly in place, democratic institutions sufficient to bring about the demise of such deviations from the norm. This should not be pictured as an impersonal dictatorial state interfering with people's liberties, but as the people, acting collectively, to protect their liberties against practices which would undermine them. Yet that things like this would actually happen—that such elitist practices would evolve—in such a situation of abundance and cooperation is rather unlikely. In such circumstances the pattern of distribution of justice as equality would be stable and, when it did require adjustment, it would be done by a democratic government functioning to protect and further the interests of everyone. This patterning would not upset liberty and undermine moral autonomy and self-respect.
(Kai Nielsen, "Impediments to Radical Egalitarianism," American Philosophical Quarterly 18 [April 1981]: 121-9, at 123-4)
Note from KBJ: How many of you are attracted to radical egalitarianism? I find it revolting. Give me liberty or give me death. Notice the malleability that Nielsen ascribes to human beings. He assumes that "possessive individualism" is an artifact of culture (specifically, capitalism) and can therefore be changed with little or no cost to other values. If human beings are acquisitive by nature, then they will be miserable in Nielsen's utopia. Equally miserable, perhaps, but miserable nonetheless. One wonders whether the events of the past two decades, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, made an impression on Nielsen's mind.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 