Justice Beyond Equality (Rescuing Justice and Equality) (Book Review‪)‬

[Review Essay: G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), xvii + 430 pp.] In his brilliant book, Rescuing Justice and Equality, G.A. Cohen endeavors to correct two confusions that he detects at the heart of the Rawlsian picture of social justice. First, Cohen argues that Rawls's well-known difference principle, which permits incentive-based inequalities that work to benefit the least advantaged, confuses distributive justice with other moral imperatives, most notably, Pareto efficiency. Distributive justice, Cohen insists, requires equality, but the difference principle sacrifices equality in the name of Pareto gains. The difference principle is thus not a fundamental principle of justice, but a compromise between justice and other values. The first part of the book thus seeks to rescue equality from various Rawlsian arguments that purport to explain why justice does not in fact require equality. In the second part of the book, Cohen aims to rescue the more general concept of justice from the more general Rawlsian constructivist methodology. In declaring that fundamental principles of justice can be derived by asking what rules parties in the original position would agree to, Cohen believes Rawls (and Rawlsians) are guilty of confusing rules of regulation with fundamental principles of justice. Even if a constructivist device like the original position is the right way to uncover the optimal rules for social organization, these rules are not pure principles of justice, since the optimal rules for social living must be sensitive to facts about the way the world is, and to values other than justice.