Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:02]
New Books Network Announcer
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries, and institutions we partner with when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:14]
Andrew Lister
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
- [01:18]
Blaine Neufeld
This week on Disorder, the podcast that
- [01:20]
Andrew Lister
orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to
- [01:42]
Blaine Neufeld
listen right now
- [01:45]
Andrew Lister
welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:50]
Blaine Neufeld
welcome to New Books in Philosophy, part of the New Books Network. My name is Blaine Neufeld. I'm a professor of philosophy who specializes in political and moral theory, and I'm an interviewer here at New Books in Philosophy, along with Carrie Figdor and Sarah Tyson. A concern with reciprocity is ubiquitous in human life. Most of us react negatively to people who cut in line, don't pay their fare when they get onto the streetcar, or enjoy the coffee provided in the department office without contributing their fair share to its purchase. Political philosophers have long appealed to reciprocity in their theories. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, argued that rational persons should leave the state of nature by pursuing peace, but only when others are willing to do so as well. Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that all legitimate contracts, including, of course, the social contract, must be mutually beneficial. More recently, reciprocity plays an important role in the work of John Rawls, arguably the most important political philosopher of the past 100 years, at least within the English speaking world. Throughout his writings in the Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, the Law of Peoples and elsewhere, Rawls appeals to reciprocity in explaining and defining many of his political ideas. Yet Rawls seems to employ different conceptions of reciprocity in different places and rarely provides his readers with a precise definition of what he means. In a recent book from Oxford University Press, justice and Reciprocity, Andrew Lister examines the nature and role of reciprocity in Rawls account of justice. Justice is fairness. The book's main claim is that reciprocity is not simply a brute fact about human nature, but to which a theory of justice must accommodate itself, nor an ideal that can provide the foundation for a conception of justice. Rather, the book argues that we should understand reciprocity as a limiting condition and many of our duties, including those of justice. In addition to defending this thesis, the book explores the role of reciprocity as a limiting condition with respect to a number of topics, including the idea of unconditional basic income, the nature of both intergenerational and international justice. The book is thus both philosophically deep and topically broad, a rare combination. We're fortunate to have the author of justice and Reciprocity, Andrew Lister, here with us today. So hello Andrew.
- [04:24]
Andrew Lister
Hi Blaine.
- [04:25]
Blaine Neufeld
Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Let's start our discussion by getting to know a little bit about you. Perhaps you could say a few things about who you are, where you're from, and how you became interested in political philosophy.
- [04:39]
Andrew Lister
Sure. I grew up in Ottawa, the nation's capital, and when I turned 18 I wanted to leave for the big city. So I went to McGill in Montreal. And I was always someone who liked arguing about politics and ideology. So I started out in politics and economics. In first year I took two courses that I remember a little bit. One was Micro Econ and the second was political theory and the microeconomics I didn't really trust and so but the political theory was really engaging. It was a team taught course. I couldn't tell you the details of what everyone said, but I just remembered that one Prof. Would get up and lecture about say Rousseau for two or three lectures and then another Prof. Would get up and say no, no, no, that's not what Rousseau said. That's not the right context, that's not its contemporary significance. So I found this very exciting and I actually switched into philosophy and eventually Finished in politics and philosophy, dropped the econ. I regret that a little bit now, but. So that's what got me into political theory. It took me a while to decide to go back to do the PhD when I did so I ended up at UCLA under the supervision of Carol Pateman. My dissertation was about the attempt to use empirical arguments to avoid moral disagreements in public policy debates, in particular debate about family values. That took me pretty far afield. I wandered a little bit intellectually. I ended up back in Montreal teaching at Concordia. And then I got a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal's center for Research on Ethics, which helped me land a job, the job I've held ever since at Queen's University in the Department of Political Studies in Kingston, Ontario.
- [06:33]
Blaine Neufeld
Great, that's really interesting. It's always a pleasure to speak to a fellow Canadian as well. But let's turn to justice and reciprocity. What motivated your interest in the topic of this book, the concept of reciprocity and its role in an account of justice?
- [06:50]
Andrew Lister
Maybe I could first give an overview of the book. I'll start with the philosophical question that interests me. It's really whether or when duties of justice are conditional on reciprocity and if so, which ones? What form do reciprocity conditions take? Why are duties conditional on reciprocity? If they are, when they are, and if there is a case for conditionality, how can duties be unconditional, as I assume some of them must be? I mean, we don't torture even known torturers, right? So some duties got to be unconditional. So why is that? And as you mentioned, the book approaches these questions via Rawls theory of justice and then a series of subsequent debates in which Rawls and reciprocity were important. And the main claim of the book is that if we think of equality in relational terms, so as fundamentally a matter of relating to others as equals and only derivatively as a matter of the distribution of non relational goods. So if we think of justice and equality in that relational way, then I think we will be led to accept that justice is to some extent conditional on reciprocity. So, okay, that's the overview of the book. I've been working on this topic for so long that I had to go back to my papers to figure out when I started and why. As far as I can tell, back in 2003, 2004, I was working on a paper about the relationship between Rawls and David Hume, specifically the question of the circumstances of justice. I think at ucla I had written something about Rawls And I remember getting some people liked it, but I remember getting a definite thumbs down from someone in the philosophy department. Of course this didn't have the intended effect because it just encouraged me to go read more. Rawls in retrospect, maybe that was the intended effect. And so I kind of got hooked on Rawls a bit. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but once you get into Rawls it's a bit of a puzzle, right? There's all these different things, there's his own lingo, you have to make your own index, cross reference, different things. He's a synthetic thinker. You have to see the big picture, how it all fits together. But the circumstances of justice, I mean the starting point there was that Rawls said that he followed Hume's account of the circumstances of justice. So the circumstances of justice are the conditions in which so called rules of justice arise. And Hume meant by that rules of property and contract that we obey with respect to total strangers. And so why would we. And then the personal virtue of following these rules. So it was a puzzle for Hume about how these rules get going. And he said that the main conditions are moderate scarcity, limited benevolence and rough equality of power. So the puzzle for me was that Rawls said he followed Hume's account of the circumstances of justice which then led Michael Sadel to ask, you know, how can a remedy for selfishness be the first virtue? And Sandel accepted Rawls claim to be following Hume, which was fair enough because that's what Rawls said. But it seemed to me that Rawls was deviating from Hume in a number of ways. In particular by introducing reasonable disagreement about justice to the conditions of justice, the circumstances of justice. So that led to thinking about principles of justice as serving to generate civic friendship involving between people who disagree about justice. And that led to public reason, thinking about public reason as moral compromise. So that was a topic of my first book about public reason and political community. But it also led me to the question of Rawls relationship with the mutual advantage tradition. So you mentioned Hobbes in your intro. So this is the tradition. Remember Glaucon and Adeimantus from book two of the Republic? Justice is the result of an agreement between egoists roughly equal in power who settle for not doing wrong so as not to suffer it. Right. So I mean at one level this is just obviously not Rawls view at all. But Rawls did say that he followed Hume. And Hume did say that if there were a species of rational but much weaker creature we wouldn't owe them justice, strictly speaking. We only owe them humanity not to be cruel. And that's because Hume took an instrumental view of justice. Right. Rules of property don't serve any purpose between the very weak and the very strong because conflict over possessions is not destabilizing. So that led me to Brian Barry. And Barry argued that Rawls theory was a blend of mutual advantage and impartiality. And Alan Gibbard responded that, no, no, it's based on reciprocity, the tendency to respond in kind. You know, we tip in strange restaurants even when we're never going to go back. Right. And so Gibbard thought that Rawls was extending this, the duty of reciprocity, from individual interactions to the social system as a whole. And I was a bit skeptical of that view. I am skeptical of that interpretation of Rawls. The other thing I'll say is that at the same time, there was a lot of debate about global justice. And so Rawls's Law of Peoples, it lacked any principle of global distributive justice had a duty of assistance, but it wasn't egalitarian. So Rawls got criticized for that. Then people defended him, and some people defended him or defended the position by arguing that equality only becomes relevant when or in the context in which people are complying with institutions and therefore contributing to public goods. And so equality really matters where there are relations of reciprocity. And this also didn't seem right to me. I didn't think you could ground egalitarianism in the duty of reciprocity. At the same time, it didn't seem to me. It seemed to me that equality is not irrelevant globally. It was wrong to say it's irrelevant. It seemed to me that the main thing to say about equality globally is that, sure, equality, distributive justice is relevant globally. It's just that we don't have assurance that those for whom we would be complying with these duties would do the same for us were circumstances reversed. So it seemed to me the lack of assurance was the key idea there. So this led to the idea that we shouldn't think of reciprocity, obviously not just as a strategy, but also not just as a duty. It can be a limiting condition on general duties. And one last thing, it seemed to me that this helped solve a problem with the theory. So if you try to base justice on the duty of reciprocity. Sorry about that. If you try to base justice on the duty of reciprocity, one obvious objection is that, well, people incapable of benefiting others aren't owed anything. So maybe, for example, someone with a severe disability is not capable of making a net contribution to social cooperation, but obviously they're owed justice. So that's an important objection. I think if we think about justice not as a duty of reciprocity, but if we think of duties conditional on reciprocity, well, it avoids that problem because someone incapable of contributing is violating no duty and not doing so. That seemed to me to be a useful thing to say, and that's how that got me onto the topic.
- [14:33]
Blaine Neufeld
Great, that's really interesting. And I see you foreshadow some of the themes that you talk about in the book, of course, in that explanation. But yeah, that's fascinating. And your reference to your previous work in political philosophy actually prompts my next question. And then I'm curious to know why your book focuses primarily on the early Rawls as opposed to the late Rawls. So just to clarify for listeners, political philosophers tend to identify two main stages in the evolution of Rawls political philosophy. The first stage concerns his development of a particular conception of justice. Justice is fairness, as presented in his famous book A Theory of justice, which was published in 1971. The second stage of Rawls political philosophical journey starts in the mid-1980s. And it has to do with Rawls's worry that the account of stability developed in the third part of A theory of justice was incompatible with with a reasonable pluralism, that is the variety of different comprehensive moral, philosophical and religious views that would inevitably thrive in a free society. Rawls came to think that the account of stability outlined in part three of A Theory of justice presupposed a general endorsement by citizens of a broadly Kantian ideal of autonomy. But in a free society, not all citizens would in fact endorse this ideal. So in his later work, Rawls sought to recast his account of justice as a purely political view, a conception of justice that would be ecumenical in nature, compatible with the different worldviews that citizens would endorse. The later Rawls's thinking culminated in the book Political Liberalism, which was published in 1993 and then later expanded with additional essays. So in short, there's an early Rawls, the Rawls of a theory of justice, and the late Rawls the Rawls of political liberalism. And so I am asking this rather long winded question, Andrew, because your book focuses on a theory of justice, although there are some references to Rawls's later works, and this was surprising to me initially as what Rawls calls the criterion of reciprocity, plays an important role with respect to many of the ideas within political liberalism, such as his account of the liberal principle of legitimacy and the idea of public reason. And moreover, as I mentioned in your answer to my previous question, some of your previous work focuses on this leader, Rawls, and indeed your first book, Public Reason and Political Community, formulates and defends a broadly Rawlsian version of public reason. So just to wrap things up, I'm curious why you decided to focus for the most part on the nature and role of reciprocity in a theory of justice as opposed to political liberalism.
- [17:22]
Andrew Lister
So a personal answer here that I was is that I was a bit tired of talking about how we should handle disagreement, and I wanted to do some actual disagreeing. So back to distributive justice. Yeah, you know, forget about pluralism, toleration, legitimacy. Let's get back to the first order questions about what's fair, what's right. But to get to your question, I mean, it's true that reciprocity is important in Rawls later work, but I guess my problem there is that why should we call public reason, why should we label it with this term criterion of reciprocity? I mean, the idea of public reason. So it goes along. If political liberalism is a liberalism that is narrow and shallow so as to be broadly acceptable, I mean, big picture, that's what political liberalism is, then public reason is the idea that we ought to make political decision based on public reasons, which are reasons it's reasonable to expect everyone to expect to accept, despite the inevitable reasonable disagreements about religion and philosophy and so on. Okay, so that's the general idea of public reason. But I just don't. It's not obvious to me what the connection is between public reason and reciprocity. I mean, one might have a very strong tendency to respond in kind, but at the same time believe that the only relevant standard in politics is truth, a correctness standard of justification. Or one might believe in public reason, but think that public reason is just unconditionally binding. So I just. It just didn't. It wasn't clear to me. And Rawls doesn't explain why it's called the criterion of reciprocity. So that's why I didn't start there. I also think that, yeah, that's basically it. I guess I'll also say one more thing about theory of justice is that reciprocity seemed to me really central in a theory of justice, but not fully developed. And in particular, a lot of Rawls discussion of reciprocity is descriptive in a Theory of justice. It comes in the moral psychology, the account of the stability of a just society, and it takes the form of a description of human psychology. There is also some discussion about duties that are conditional on reciprocity in discussion of the assurance problem, but he's not very explicit about that. And I'll just say one more point. I mean, in your intro you said that I'm thinking of reciprocity as a limiting condition, not as an ideal. I would just correct that a little bit. I will say I think it was an ideal for Rawls. I have some quotes in the book where he does almost explicitly say this is an ideal, but it's not really fully developed. What exactly is this ideal? What is its content? I mean, it has something to do with mutual recognition of persons, mutual recognition of persons as persons and as equals.
- [20:25]
Blaine Neufeld
But, yeah, great, that's very helpful and answers the question I had when I first began reading your book. Let's turn now to Rawls's two official definitions of reciprocity. As you know, Rawls is a bit cagey when it comes to explaining what he means by reciprocity in all his work. Right. He rarely provides us with an explicit definition, but he does provide us with a definition in two different places. And I was wondering if you could just outline these two accounts. You might call them the official Rawls accounts of reciprocity. The first being mutual benefit compared to a fair baseline, and the second as an intermediate point between impartiality and mutual advantage, a definition that he takes from Alan Gibbert, as you noted earlier. So could you just say a bit more about these two definitions and in addition, explain to the listeners why you find the first definition quite unhelpful.
- [21:33]
Andrew Lister
Yeah. So these are from political liberalism and mutual benefit relative to a fair baseline, which is the baseline of equality. So my objection to this definition is that I don't think we need the idea of reciprocity to express the view. I think reciprocity just becomes an arbitrary label. So mutual benefit relative to a baseline of equality. So what do we need here? We need. There's some dimension of advantage. Increases in that dimension are good. Equality in that dimension is also good. But universal increases outweigh equality. So there's four ideas. Dimension of advantage increases good equality. Good universal increases outweigh equality. Fine, no problem. But what does that have to do with reciprocity? Where does the idea of reciprocity comes in? I think this is maybe a good point to give the general formal definition of reciprocity, I think, of reciprocity as symmetry of oriented properties. So whereas equality in the formal sense might be just lack of dispersion of properties that have no orientation, reciprocity is a symmetry of oriented properties. And I just don't see that definition of reciprocity in the mutual benefit view. There is one way you could bring reciprocity in and that would be to distinguish mutual from universal. So universal means literally everyone benefits. But you might say something different. You might say, well, not that literally everyone benefits, but that everyone benefits who's committed to other people benefiting. So that would bring a kind of conditional moral motivation into the definition. And I think that would bring in a real definition of reciprocity, a real element of reciprocity. The other idea is that reciprocity lies between impartiality and mutual advantage. So I'm understanding that it's maybe not quite right, but I'm understanding impartiality as perfect impartiality, you know, like perfect utilitarianism on the one hand and then self interest on the other or egoism on the other. And the idea is that reciprocity is some blend between the two, like 50, 50 or 60, 40, some middling level of concern for others. And I don't think, I mean, that's not wrong, it's just not quite specific enough. I think what's distinctive about reciprocity is not how much we care for others, but how this care is calibrated depending on how they care for us or, or for others in general. And so this is what gives rise to, you know, if you think about. When Rawls defines fair terms of cooperation or reasonableness, he doesn't say universal benefit from cooperation. He says if you look carefully, everyone benefits. All those who do their part in the cooperative scheme benefit. So there's an element of conditionality there. And it's that conditionality that interests me. Why? What's its justification and what are its limits?
- [24:35]
Blaine Neufeld
Great. So thanks for that. And now I want to turn to your. This discussion of ideal theory that you have in chapter two of the book. I actually found this really interesting. Rawls famously claimed that what he called ideal theory, that is theorizing about justice as realized in a well ordered society, a society with just institutions and in which citizens freely comply with the requirements of justice, should be understood to have priority over non ideal theory, that is thinking about what justice requires us to do in existing unjust circumstances. So this claim about the priority of ideal theory has been widely criticized in recent decades, although it certainly still has many defenders. So one of the Discussions in your book that I found most interesting was your defense of the priority of ideal theory in chapter two. And there are sort of two arguments that you provide to defend this priority. Wondering if you could just summarize those arguments for our listeners.
- [25:38]
Andrew Lister
Yeah, so first of all, I have to acknowledge that this ideal of a well ordered society, it is super ideal, right? It is, I mean, a society in which it's common knowledge that we accept the same principles and that our institutions satisfy these principles and that people generally comply is really not a real existing thing. And I also think that Rawls focus on ideal theory tends to camouflage the question of conditionality a little bit. That's a point I take from a book by G. Wei C. I'm probably mispronouncing that, but he wrote a really good book called the Two Faces of Justice, and I'm building on his. I disagree with him on some things, but I'm building on that as well as on Stuart White's the Civic Minimum. Right. So the well ordered society is super ideal, but we also have to take into account the other half of the picture, which is stability. So this is the first reason for ideal theory first. And I call this the social construction argument, which maybe is a weird label, but the basic idea, this is how I understand part of Rawls, which is that we don't want to let the cultural and psychological effects of past injustice lead us to declare just institutions infeasible prematurely. So human nature is partly socially constructed, and if we assume that past institutions have been unjust, it's been partly constructed by injustice. So maybe people aren't willing to pay appropriately high levels of taxation because they're in a competitive, unequal society. That's what they were raised in. So people tend to look out for number one, right? Or maybe not just look out for yourself, but look out for your kids. Maybe this is a consequence, this motivation is a consequence of the. The way we were raised, the institutions we were raised. But it still could be that better, maybe not perfectly just, but better institutions are possible and those might have an incremental effect on human character. And maybe that change in character would open up new possibilities for institutional improvement. So it's really unclear how that process of development will unfold over the long run. But I think what Rawls was trying to do, he was trying to do something a little bit easier, but still difficult, which was to show that if you successfully established a just society, at least it wouldn't fall apart. It would have tendency to be stable. People would tend to follow the rules. And if the rules deviated from justice, they would tend to re establish just rules. Why? Because they were raised under just institutions. And given human nature as it has been constructed by evolution, people raised under just institutions would come to have an effective and appropriate sense of justice. And the key aspect of human nature here, I think is motivation by reciprocity, which Rawls took to be a kind of trans historical fact about human nature. Of course culturally variable, but with roots in evolution, not just in variable institutions and culture. So you can't understand the general compliance stage of analysis without the second stage, stability analysis. It's really his attempt to say. I interpret it as his attempt to say we can hope for justice and that hope is going to give us reason to keep working towards it. Because approximate justice is not impossible. It's not a huge. Like there's a kind of pessimism lurking in the background here, this worry that maybe even approximate justice is really inconsistent with human nature and the structural features of modern life. So that's the first argument for doing ideal theory first. The second is more normative in a way. It's simpler. I think that if justice is partly conditional on reciprocity, then we have to answer the question of what we owe the fully compliant before we answer the question of what we owe the partially compliant. And again, I'll make a comparison with utilitarianism here. I mean, for a pure utilitarian, there's no issue here, right? Your duty is just to maximize utility. And of course, how you maximize utility, well, that's going to depend upon what other people are doing. But your basic duty is invariant. I think things look very different if one thinks that of justice as duties one owes to other persons. And if one thinks that at least some of these duties are conditional on reciprocity, then I think that full or strict compliance will have a kind of logical priority from a moral point of view. I mean, not that we're going to choose policies making false assumptions about levels of compliance, but that whenever we're reasoning about things we owe rights and duties in conditions of partial compliance we always have in the background we have to be presupposing some account of what we would owe to each other under conditions of full compliance. That's the view.
- [30:50]
Blaine Neufeld
Great, that was really interesting and thank you for that clarification. Let's turn to chapters two, three and four. Well, I guess we just talked a bit about chapter two, but these chapters discuss different notions of reciprocity. And I was wondering if you could outline these different conceptions of Reciprocity for us. And in particular, I think it would be interesting if you could explain why you think that justice cannot be based on reciprocity. I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but maybe flesh that out a bit more for us.
- [31:27]
Andrew Lister
So when I say that justice can't be based on reciprocity, what I'm really talking about is the duty of reciprocity. You do a good turn for me, I should do a good turn for you, or pay it forward for someone else. I don't disagree with that. I just don't think we can ground justice there. But if we think about reciprocity as an ideal, well, maybe reciprocity can play a grounding role. But then it's a bit less clear what exactly the ideal is. Let me back up for a moment. So, okay, so I've set aside reciprocity as strategy from the mutual advantage tradition. Reciprocity as motivation is the psychology of reciprocity. This idea that human beings are by nature have some tendency to respond in kind. That's how Rawls described it. I mean, he focused on positive reciprocity. You receive a benefit, you pay forward a benefit. Actually, he wasn't just talking about receiving a benefit then conferring a benefit. He was also talking about attitudes and emotions and concern and care. So if you look closely at his moral psychology, it's actually about love and affection and friendship. It's, you know, kids who are loved tend to love in turn. If you're in an organization or association with people and they're doing their part and following rules that seem more or less just, then you tend to develop feelings of friendship towards them, your colleagues. Right. You tend to care for them. Okay, so that's kind of an expansion of our sphere of concern. But then the other side of motivation by reciprocity, well, you can think of motivation by reciprocity as having a darker side or maybe two different shades of gray. One is just conditionality of pro social behavior. So some people are inclined towards altruism, even with respect to people who've never benefited them in the past. Maybe you're a total stranger, but I can do you some significant benefit at low cost to myself. And I say, sure, but there is some experimental evidence that people will withdraw or limit that altruism if the target of that conduct behaves badly. So this is a kind of concern withdrawal. And it feeds into the broader idea of conditional cooperation, that human beings are conditional cooperators. You know, I don't want to be a cheat, but I don't want to be a Sucker either. And these, these, this conditional cooperation may seem perfectly reasonable to a lot of people. It will. But other people have a more unilateralist view about morality and then we could talk about negative reciprocity. Rawls didn't talk about negative reciprocity. But some people are willing punishers. In the words of Elinor Ostrom. They have a taste for punishment. They're willing to pay a cost to punish norm violators. And having such people around can be useful because it gives egoists an incentive to behave like conditional cooperators. But in itself, the this kind of retributivism, it's at least unpleasant, if not immoral. Okay, so that's reciprocity as motivation, I guess. I don't think you can ground duty on psychological facts about motivation. There's a worry about defining justice down here. Suppose you took the view that justice is much more unilateral and unconditional, but that I proved to you that, look, it's just a fact. Evolution. Until we modify genetics, human beings are going to be motivated by reciprocity. Conditional cooperators. Does that mean you should change your view about what's truly just? I mean, clearly you're going to have to change your view about what's feasible, what policies to endorse. But why should you change your views about true justice? I mean, this is David Aslund, right? Would do it with cruelty to make it even more pronounced. Suppose I prove to you that cruelty is written into human nature and it's never going to change, at least not anytime soon. In the next 500 years. Are you going to change your views about what's right? No, you're going to, you might change your views about what policies to. Okay, so this is the defining down worry. What about basing justice or egalitarianism on the duty of reciprocity? And here I already mentioned this issue about severe disabilities. The scope of justice is. Worry about the scope of justice, but you can also think about the content of justice. I mean, I take it for granted there has to be some kind of duty to help promote justice. If we're 30% justice, we all have a duty to help move it up to 40%, something like that. But I don't think that can be a duty of reciprocity because, I mean, it just seems obvious that, you know, you're not at 30% justice. Most people are not getting what they deserve. And so it's not going to be a duty of reciprocity, I don't think. But basic rights too. Like I have a duty to respect your basic rights, even if you've never benefited me in the past. And yeah, and I also think that although the duty of reciprocity is real, specifying that duty is going to require a theory, a prior theory of justice. It's going to require some standard of proportionality, some standard of when the duty applies. And I think that egalitarianism and egalitarian justice is going to be sitting there in the background. You can't ground it on reciprocity. And then the final thing I'll just say about. So there is this discussion in Rawls of the assurance problem and what he called Hobbes thesis. You mentioned Hobbes earlier. So Hobbes thesis, it was not that in a prisoner's dilemma we have a dominant strategy to defect, and so we need a coercive sovereign to get us out of a prisoner's dilemma. To the contrary, it was that I need you to be coerced so I have assurance of your conduct. And if I do have assurance of your conduct, then I comply voluntarily, even if I'm not under threat of punishment. And the same for you, too. So it's this kind of paradoxical situation where we both need to be coerced, but neither needs to be coerced. And so Rawls described the sense of justice as having this element of conditionality, but he didn't really explain whether it was just a fact of psychology or whether it was justified. And, you know, it seems justified with respect to some duties. Right? Like why should I obey laws I disagree with if you won't obey laws you disagree with? I don't think that seems plausible there. But another place can be more controversial. What about duties of assistance? Okay, if it's rescue, if you're drowning, I'm not going to ask too many questions. I'm just going to pull you out of the water. But if we're talking about duties of those who aren't in immediate danger of dying, and maybe duties of ongoing assistance, a lot of people are going to say those duties do become conditional on reciprocity or. And then also the duty to share the benefits of cooperation fairly, maybe I should say what I mean by limiting condition, because that's an important idea. But it's. So when I say duties are conditional on reciprocity, I don't mean conditional on expectation of future benefit. So these are genuine duties that could be costly. They're not just strategies. I also don't mean conditional on how many other duty holders are complying. I mean conditional on some degree of assurance that the person to whom you owe the duty would comply were they to find themselves in the circumstances in which the duty applies. It may not be likely that positions will be reversed. Right. That the restaurant you're never going to go back to. So reciprocity conditions are fundamentally bilateral and counterfactual. Yeah, so to say. But everyone's doing it. That's generally not a good excuse. But the claim that you wouldn't do it for me, I think that can be not just a good excuse but a good justification for non compliance in some cases. And I'm not just talking about how the compliance of others affects the costliness of a duty. I'm talking about how the non compliance of the people owed the duty can reduce the costs. The maximum costs a duty can comply on me. And this actually goes back to Hobbes. If we think of Hobbes laws of nature, they're conditionally binding. Right. But what's the condition? Is the condition comply with respect to compliers or is the condition comply if you can do so safely? Those are related, but they're not the same actually. Sharon Lloyd interprets Hobbes as holding that we have to comply except when lack of reciprocity would make compliance really costly. So there's different ways of going here. I might also mention that the reciprocity conditions are different than fair shares constraints. So a fair share's constraint on a duty is, you know, we ask what's everyone's fair share of the duty? If everyone complies, then you cap the maximum cost of the duty. For me at my fair share, you know, if others are doing less, why should I do more? But that's, I don't think that's really the right way of thinking of this. I think the real question is it's not because at some level morality is always going to impose extra costs as others do less. The real question is why should I do something for others that they would never do for me? And I, you know. Yeah. So I think, I think there's, there's different there. I might have a duty to. I might not have a duty to do my fair share for someone who isn't willing to do their fair share for others. Conversely, I might have a duty to take up the slack for a slack taker. Right. So okay, that's maybe enough. I'm talking too much.
- [41:57]
Home Depot Advertiser
Spring is starting at the Home Depot and we're bringing you low prices guaranteed so you can wake up your yard this season, shape up your lawn with top brand outdoor power tools like this Ryobi 40 volt mower with up to 50 minutes of runtime. Bring in a splash of color with spring blooms and fresh plants from the Home Depot Garden Center. Then refresh your garden beds and keep them clear of weeds with Vigoro Mulch. Free bags for $10. Start your spring with low prices guaranteed only at the Home Depot exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com pricematch for details.
- [42:27]
Blaine Neufeld
Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache
- [42:29]
Botox Advertiser
days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
- [42:32]
Blaine Neufeld
Botox Onobachulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It Prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month. Verses 6 to 7 for placebo prescription
- [42:46]
Botox Advertiser
Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [43:21]
Blaine Neufeld
Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. Not at all, actually, because I want you to say a few things more about your justification for regarding reciprocity as a kind of limiting condition on at least some of our duties. I mean, you provide what you call a dignitary rationale for this way of understanding reciprocity. So can you just say a few things about this rationale for regarding reciprocity as a limiting condition?
- [43:49]
Andrew Lister
Yeah, so this is an idea I find in Stuart White in his third chapter of his book the Civic Minimum. I'm just developing this. I'm not sure he would agree with everything I say here, but probably wouldn't. But so the way I come at this is through the general concept of reciprocity as symmetry of oriented properties. I distinguish accidental from non accidental reciprocity. The case of accidental would be two perfect utilitarians who care for each other, but they don't care that each other cares. And they would care regardless of whether the other cares, so it seems accidental. In contrast, reciprocity is non accidental. It could be in either or both of two ways. One is just that each party values the mutuality of concern. So this might be a parent child relationship where each cares unconditionally, but each wants the other to care. I call that aspirational, merely aspirational. The other way is when the concern of each party is conditional on the concern of the other, as it might be in the case of a friendship. So you and I are friends, but if you really don't care for me and you make that clear and it lasts for some amount of time, then I'm not going to be your friend either. I don't know if this is how you think of friendship played, and hopefully this isn't too much of a shock for me to say this, but okay, so I call that explanatory. Maybe that's not the right word. Maybe you call it anyway. So reciprocity can be non accidental in these two ways. And so one way of framing the question about reciprocity is if we think that non accidental reciprocity has value, which of these two ways is it? Is it just the aspirational way or is it this conditioning or explanatory way? And so the challenge here in my mind is that we can think of a system of rights and duties that is perfectly egalitarian, well, perfectly equal, at least on paper, but that is also fully unconditional. And this would involve reciprocity accidentally we just follow from equality. What would be wrong with such a system? That's a question. And the one answer here is that fully unconditional morality would be too demanding, too costly. But I don't think that's quite right. I think the main objection to 100% unconditionality is that it would generate a kind of subordination. I mean, think about how unconditional demands, think about how you might think about what the kinds of demands we could make on each other in a fully unconditional system. So I could say to you, oh yeah, I'd never do this for you, but you still have to do it for me. You owe it to me to do this for me, even though I'd never do it for you, because your duty is unconditional. And it's true that mine is too, and I'm ignoring mine, but you know, I still insist that you have to do it for me. And I think accepting such demands would involve a form of subordination, an admission that one person exists only to generate benefits for others. And so the problem here is not really the absolute level of costs or how costs scale up with the non compliance of others. It's that unconditionality, pure unconditionality, doesn't limit the the extent of the costs that people are bearing for the sake of benefiting non compliers. And I think this way of thinking is kind of unavoidable if you adopt a relational conception of equality. I mean, if you adopt a purely distributive account of equality, it's maybe less of a concern. But if you think of equality as a relationship and if you think that relationships depend on attitudes people have towards each other and the kinds of things that people can say to one another and the demands they can make on one another, then I think this argument is hard to resist. Let me make an objection to myself here. You might object that even if non complier, you might object that. So we could say that non compliers can't demand compliance, but the duties could remain binding nonetheless. So you might just say so that would be the objection. And I think that's true. But I think it's because the duties in question would have a multilateral structure. And what I mean by this is that let's say you're free speech rights and suppose you're someone who doesn't respect the free speech rights of others. So it would seem that I can't owe it to you to respect your free speech rights, but I might owe it to others to respect your free speech rights. So that's the idea of a multilateral duty. And I think that, I mean you have to distinguish here duties directed to particular persons from all things considered duties. And with multilateral duties, then you can get all things considered duties that are effectively unconditional. They're not waivable by any one person, but only by all the people together who are owed the duty. And they're only jointly voidable by non compliance. So they're effectively unconditional. I think that's true. I just don't think that all duties have that multilateral structure. And so this raises the question of, well, when are duties conditional? Unconditional? Sorry. And I mean that's. Do you want me to talk about that? I think that's an important topic because I guess when I started writing about this, I was pretty much persuaded that justice has this conditional side, but then it also has to have an unconditional side. And G. Wei C. In his book the Two Faces of Justice, he argues that justice has an unconditional side but it's just socially constructed. It's kind of an illusion built by social, a useful illusion built by social institutions. And it's a slightly cynical or maybe just realistic view. And I guess I was trying to come up with a more principled account of unconditionality. So that's. Yeah, that's. I could talk. Yeah. Let me say, let me say something. If you won't tell me. No, shake your head if. Okay, so. Okay, so I'll just list a couple of ways duties can be unconditional. So one is reparative duties. If I wrong you, I think my duty to repair the wrong is unconditional. And what I mean there is that I have a duty to repair the wrong I did to you. Even if you would never repair a wrong you did to me. Maybe even if you have previously wronged me and not repaired the wrong. Why would that be? Well, it's because there's an easy way to avoid having to comply with respect to a non complier. And it's just don't violate the person's rights in the first place. And so I think that reparative duties are unconditional for that reason. I also think that in some cases you might owe a duty to someone and you think, or maybe even you're confident that they wouldn't comply with the duty with respect to you. But maybe you're also confident that they're never going to have a chance to fail. Like the, the positions are never going to be reversed. And I think when, when failures of. I think in that case duties may be unconditionally binding. A third case is, is. Is low cost duties. The reciprocity conditions may not lower the maximum costs a duty can impose to zero, they may just lower them. And I think, I guess I think of Rawls natural duty of justice in this way. The natural duty to help create just institutions. A number of cases when Rawls talks about natural duties, at least the natural positive duties he includes a cost constraint at least when or only if it doesn't impose too much cost on you. And I think of those low cost duties as being unconditional precisely because they're low cost. And you can think of those as being multilateral as well. I guess imperfection comes in too here. I mean I can't demand more perfection of others than I realize myself. And so that, that also is going to generate a form of. It's going to limit conditionality. Okay, I'll stop there.
- [52:21]
Blaine Neufeld
No, that's really interesting and I think it's very helpful to understand your overall picture that you're not in any way arguing that reciprocity is a limiting condition on all duties. I mean, I think that has to be emphasized, but that it does limit some important duties. And so just spelling that out, that distinction between cases in which it's unconditional and cases in which it is conditional, I think is very helpful and very interesting as well. So we've explored the philosophical nature of reciprocity. We've gone into the depths of it and made some important distinctions. Now I want to turn to the more applied part of the book where you talk about unconditional basic income, future generations, and global justice, among other topics. So let's start with unconditional basic income and reciprocity. So while versions of the idea of an unconditional basic income have been around for centuries, it has become increasingly popular in recent years over the last few decades. What makes ubi, or unconditional basic income, interesting is that it has boosters on both the left and right. That is, there are versions of UBI that are endorsed by egalitarians and versions endorsed by libertarians. Yet many political philosophers, including arguably Rawls, objected to the idea of an unconditional basic income on reciprocity grounds. I was wondering if you could provide us with an overview of unconditional basic income, why some theorists have objected to it as incompatible with a commitment to reciprocity, and why you think that there is a case to be made for UBI within the framework of justice as fairness.
- [54:12]
Andrew Lister
Sure. So, first of all, with ubi, we're talking about a regular cash payment to individuals, regardless of whether they're looking for or willing to work. And that's what makes it uncontroversial. It's also paid to everyone, even those who have high incomes. But of course, it has to be. You have to have money to pay for it. So taxes are going to have to be higher. So that's not really the main issue. The main issue is that it's unconditional on willingness or looking for work. But it can be designed in different ways. And there's two main variables here. One is the level low versus high, and then second is its relation to the rest of the welfare state. How much of the rest of the welfare state is UBI replacing? I mean, maybe nothing, but maybe wide swaths of. Of the welfare state. You might imagine getting rid of minimum wage laws, but putting in place a ubi or you could imagine getting rid of a lot of other things. So that's part of the ideological ambiguity of the policy that you were talking about. So the reciprocity objection to ubi. I mean, suppose you accept that duties of assistance and fair sharing are to some extent conditional on reciprocity. Then it will seem that ubi, or it may seem that UBI presents you with two choices, neither of which is fully consistent with reciprocity, neither of which is fully consistent with your conditional duties. Either you work and then support some people who could contribute but don't, or you don't work and okay, there you avoid supporting people who could contribute but don't. But then you become a non contributor. You are not supporting yourself and you're not contributing the support of those who need help supporting themselves. So that's the reciprocity objection as I understand it, and it's one that intuitively I endorse. But it faces this really powerful objection, which is the argument from inherited assets. And this is really the puzzle behind the chapter. And I should say that I really found this chapter hard to write. I wrote a paper about this topic and then I completely rewrote the chapter for the book and then I rewrote it again and I still don't think it's right. But okay, so the inherited assets argument is that. So I said that those who are able to work but are not looking for work, not trying to work, they're not contributing anything. But the inherent assets argument says no, no, of course they're contributing something. They're contributing their fair share of the world's natural resources, because after all, the world was given to mankind in common, as Locke said. Right? And so just think of world's natural resources, plus add the resources, the social and built resources inherited from previous generations. No one alive built that. Right? That's just stuff we are gifted from the past. Okay, so in principle, that ought to be divided equally. And so the UBI don't think of it as the product of the labor of your contemporaries. Think of it simply as the cash value of a tradable right to inherited assets. The way to think about this, the way that Philippe Van Paris explains this and others, not just him, but imagine the world being divided up into equal shares of land and tools and buildings inherited from previous generations. Everyone, okay, People have different preferences about tools versus about. Sorry, about time versus toys. Who wants free time to walk on the beach? Who wants more toys? Big screen TVs? The people who want toys are going to have to work more. Okay, but if some people have a relatively stronger preference for toys over time, they may want to work the land of others, and so they may want to rent land from others. What's wrong with that? Nothing wrong with that. So, yeah, so from this perspective, there's nothing wrong with ubi, it's just sharing fairly inherited assets. This is an argument I find both fascinating and puzzling. It strikes me as intuitively wrong, but intellectually compelling. It's like the first time you read Nozick on liberty versus patterns and you say, no, no, no, no, no, this can't be right. But it's right. How is it right? No, it can't be right. You know, so, so why do I disagree? I guess it is because the inherited assets argument has kind of a left libertarian flavor to it. So it manages to justify equalizing redistribution without invoking any enforceable duty of assistance or any enforceable duty to share fairly the benefits of social cooperation. It starts from the premise that people have one way to understand it. This may be unfair, but it starts from the premise that people have. Sure, people have unconditional rights to private property, it's just that they're egalitarian rights. And sure, people can't be forced to help each other, but they can be forced not to take too much. And that's what justifies ubi, and that's what I disagree with. And again, here I'm following Stuart White. I think, I think of all property rights as being functional and justified only as part of a scheme of cooperation to the extent they serve valuable social purposes. So, yeah, so that's not a very full criticism of the inheritance assets argument, but that's basically where I'm coming from. I think the Rawlsian case for UBI would be that if we're using a system of private property and free markets for efficiency purposes, we also have a duty of justice to protect people against risk, because privatizing property, it increases the average, but it also increases the variance of returns. And so I think that UBI is just an effective, non stigmatizing and efficient, simple way of providing this protection against risk. There's some moral hazard involved, but that's true for any insurance program, so long as it's not too high. Not a big deal. I would say one more thing, which is I think that there's a second side to the argument, which is that when we're thinking about reciprocity in economic systems, we should think about the incentives, the whole system. We shouldn't just look at income assistance, we should look at the whole system and we should say, what incentives does the system create? And if we have an economic system that is overly competitive, one where the minimum is very low and the, the extremes are very wide. That really incentivizes competition, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of your kids and making sure they get ahead. I think that's going to incentivize people, pressure people to ignore their duties of reciprocity and to ignore their duties that are conditional on reciprocity or to interpret their duties conditional on reciprocity in a stingy kind of habeasian fashion. Right. I don't comply unless I'm super confident you're going to comply. And so I think that UBI would be part of creating a system that is only appropriately competitive, put it that way. Yeah.
- [61:44]
Blaine Neufeld
Okay, great. So as I think our listeners can understand, there's a lot covered in this book and we've covered a number of topics and I do want to, since we're coming close to the limit of our time, I do want to at least give you the opportunity to say some things about two additional chapters which are very interesting. A chapter on future generations or intergenerational justice, and the chapter on global justice. And maybe you could give us a big picture overview of what you say in those two chapters.
- [62:20]
Andrew Lister
So for duties to future generations, it's traditionally, this topic has traditionally been seen as a problem for justice's reciprocity because I mean, what has the future done for us lately? Obviously, if you're thinking strategically in terms of the mutual advantage tradition, they can't hurt us. And even if you're thinking in terms of that, justice is a duty of reciprocity. Well, when have they benefited us? But I just think this is the wrong way to think about duties to future generations. The reason we have duties to future generations is they have interests and we can impact those interests. And okay, there's non identity, but let's set that aside. There are some people who will exist anyway in the future after I'm dead, and what my actions can impact them. So of course I've said just like people live downstream, the downstreamers can't pollute the upstreamers. But that. So I mean that's. And there is an issue about, you know, law. So think of, in terms of reciprocity conditions, would they comply with their duties to us? I don't know. That's hard to say. But I'm also pretty sure that they're never going to be in a position to actually fail in their duties to us. They're never going to be in a position to affect us. We could quibble, we could argue about that maybe okay, but so yeah, if they fail in their duties, it's going to hurt the further future, not me. So I don't think this worry about. So I think that a lot of the worries about news to future generations or at least these worries based on justice as a reciprocity are overblown. As for global justice, I touched on this a little bit at the outset. Joe Heath, you know, Joe Heath, another Canadian philosopher, he has a nice example from his original defense of Rawls on global justice. He you know, Canada has this equalization program where for non Canadians it redistributes income. The federal government redistributes income from poorer to richer provinces in order to assure that each province can provide roughly equal public services.
- [64:30]
Blaine Neufeld
I think you mean the other way around. From richer to poorer provinces.
- [64:33]
Andrew Lister
Sorry, that's what I do. Yeah. Actually any social insurance program would do the same thing if it was a national social insurance program. But it's just that in Canada the social insurance mostly run by provinces. So the federal government does this. Anyway, Joe Heath says, why don't we have equalization, kind of voluntary equalization from Canada as a whole to a poorer country, I don't know, say Egypt or I don't know, some other poorer country. And I think the obvious answer is that yeah, sure, maybe Alberta has helped out Newfoundland for many years, at least until Newfoundland finds oil. But if positions were to be reversed, then they would go the other way, right? And so it's that assurance of reciprocity. So that's how I understand assurance of the relevance of assurance and reciprocity at the global level. So the question is then, is this too stingy a view? I mean, I think a lot of my colleagues would say this is too stingy a view. A lot of my colleagues are much more unilateralist about global justice, much more cosmopolitan. So does this make the view wrong? So how. I guess there's a few paths worth exploring. One would be that some duties of global justice are reparative. If so, then they're not going to be conditional on reciprocity. Another path would be that if there are very big differences in wealth, then we come to the then we're in the situation of a merely counterfactual fail. The very poor and the very rich country are just not realistically going to switch positions, so there's no actual worry about switching positions. And then thirdly, the argument might be that we have duties to help construct institutions necessary to provide assurance. So for example, a duty to negotiate free trade deals with other Countries who are willing to confront climate change. And these duties would be, they might be unconditional, but cost limited. But yeah, this is an area where you could really push back and say the view has unacceptable implications.
- [66:45]
Blaine Neufeld
Okay, great. Well, thanks, Andrew. We've taken up a lot of your time, but let's end our discussion by talking about what you're working on now if you want to share that with us, what plans you have for future projects.
- [67:01]
Andrew Lister
I'm working on a paper, a project actually which I call egalitarianism without the moral arbitrariness of talents. So this relates to the topic of luck egalitarianism and Rawls relationship with luck egalitarianism. And I touch upon it a little bit in the book, but I think I'm going to work more on that. So one of the main pillars of egalitarianism, as you know, any anytime someone says, look, I have a right to my high income because I made it myself, I'm a self made man, I'm the entrepreneur. There are two, two broad arguments egalitarians make. One is that, well, you didn't do anything to deserve the potentialities with which you are born, nor did you deserve, you know, middle class parents. My parents were both schoolteachers, you know, safe neighborhood, two parents, lots of good social network. So no surprise I ended up at McGill rather than working right away out of high school. Not a surprise that I graduated from high school. Right, because okay, so. But egalitarians have become wary of such arguments, arguments based on the moral arbitrariness of so called native endowments. Listeners may be familiar with Elizabeth Anderson's famous paper, the value of equality or the point of Equality, Am I getting the title wrong? And her hypothetical letter from the state equality board. And so the second alternative is to set aside this issue of the moral arbitrariness of talents, but to argue that the contributions of those who apparently make big contributions actually depend upon the contributions of others. So this is Obama's. You remember Obama, you didn't build that. He got in trouble for saying that, but it was the successful entrepreneur. Of course he didn't mean you didn't build that at all. He meant you didn't build that all on your own. You had help from workers, from a government which, you know, you brought your goods to market on public roads, publicly educated workers. He was building on Elizabeth Warren statements and she's made. So you might call this the social contribution thesis. And the paper I'm trying to write, or I'm writing the project is about what egalitarianism looks like if it's based solely on the social contribution thesis, without the moral arbitrariness thesis. And yeah, so I'm interested in the history of that idea. I mean the moral arbitrariness history. This is not just Rawls. Right. It goes back to socialists Christian teachings probably. I don't know this, but I'm sure other of the religious traditions. So I'm interested in the history of the idea, how it's interpreted by luck egalitarians do luck egalitarianship between what's the relationship between thinking of justice as reciprocity and luck egalitarianism. I think there are some differences there. I may also get back to public reason. I'm going to try to get back to public reason, but we'll see. It's hard to plan. I find very hard to plan where I'm going.
- [70:15]
Blaine Neufeld
I can empathize with that.
- [70:17]
Andrew Lister
And then once I've been there for too long, I forget how I got there.
- [70:22]
Blaine Neufeld
I definitely have similar experiences. All right, well, thank you, Andrew, for discussing your excellent book justice and Reciprocity with us here at the New Books in Philosophy podcast, which is part of the New Books Network. And thank you listeners for listening for being part of this experience. So thanks again, Andrew, and take care.
- [71:01]
New Books Network Announcer
Long drive ahead TikTok shows road trip
- [71:03]
Andrew Lister
spots, car hacks, travel playlists, best routes, hidden cafes, scenic stops. Drive smarter, Explore more. Download TikTok now.