The Great Cake* Experiment

Zizek, Rawls and envy

   Envy poses more than one problem for egalitarian theories of justice. One problem, the one I propose to talk about a little here, is that envy, being a deep-seated human feeling, might destroy the social arrangement that a theory has identified as the just one. (Envy carries such destructive potential, because not only does it have a benign form [perhaps motivating the improvement of one’s lot] but, more characteristically, envy sanctions depriving others of goods, even when that would leave untouched or worsen the situation of the envious.)

   Slavoj Zizek, for instance, has made such a criticism of John Rawls’ influential theory of justice. Zizek thinks (or, at least, says—that fussy distinction is perhaps necessary to make in Zizek’s case) that, notwithstanding the ingenuity of Rawls’ theory, it signally fails to understand the destructive force of human envy, as identified in the psychoanalytic work of Freud or Lacan. But Rawls’ theory is supposed to be a theory of justice for humans. If Zizek is correct, Rawls has made a basic blunder.

   Objections that rely on Freudian claims about the human condition are often not taken seriously by analytic (or “non-bullshit”) political philosophers. But one need not be a Freudian, let alone a Lacanian Stalinist—Zizek’s favourite self-appellation—to think that envy causes a problem for political philosophy. Indeed Rawls himself considers the problem of envy at some length. So who has outmanoeuvred whom here?

   First it will be useful to establish why exactly there is a problem of envy for (the egalitarian) Rawls. For, if people have equal amounts of things, then clearly there is no problem of envy. And Rawls does think some things should be held equally: political liberties and so forth. The difficulty arises from a principle of justice, the (in)famous difference principle, that Rawls thinks would be accepted as fair by rational people. That principle says that some inequalities are just, when the worst-off in society benefit maximally from them. What Rawls has in mind is that a rational person, given an initially equal distribution of a good, would prefer an unequal distribution so long as his holding of the good improved under the new, unequal distribution (with certain background political liberties in place). If you and I each have five fish, for example, then if I am rational, and other things being equal, I will prefer a distribution in which you have ten fish, so long as I have more than five. Since that difference principle would be accepted as fair, it’s therefore also just, on Rawls’ theory of justice.

   Now once the difference principle is in operation, clearly envy becomes a live issue. If envy is a deep-seated human feeling, on a Freudian or any other account of envy, then it seems possible that it would surface because of difference-principle inequalities. Aware of this, Rawls offers a solution. For Rawls the problem of envy goes away if he can show that there are counteracting elements within his system that contain the tendency to feel envy. The equal political liberties I mentioned above, for instance, are a significant counteracting element. If, despite unequal economic holdings, you and I regard each other as political equals, that vitiates my tendency to feel envy. Another counteracting element is the original idea that the problematic inequalities are sanctioned by fairness. That counteracts feelings of envy, because even if I am worse off than you, I know that you are not better off because of a moral claim that you deserve, somehow, to be better off. So envy is contained, and Rawls takes his account of justice to be confirmed.

   I think most (analytic) political philosophers regard Zizek’s criticism, if they are aware of it, as definitively answered by Rawls’ solution to the problem of envy. They think Zizek just absurdly overestimates the power of envy or misunderstands Rawls. That may be so. But I think those philosophers don’t quite do justice to the gravamen of Zizek’s charge against Rawls. Zizek doesn’t just think that the problem is whether envy might be contained; he thinks there is a special feature of Rawls’ system that makes it uncontainable. The special feature is that in a Rawlsian society difference-principle inequalities are not merely accepted as necessary facts of life. They are seen as just. Therefore, if you are on the receiving end of such an inequality, Zizek thinks, you face an especially dreadful psychological condition. Your envy, if you feel it, has no outlet, since you know that the inequality is a fair one. Such a contradiction between what you feel and what you know to be true is the prelude to social disintegration, pace Rawls. (That argument is, I think, a version of one of Zizek’s standard sallies against liberalism: he asks you to imagine your old-school, domineering father demanding you visit your sick grandmother; then to imagine your modern, liberal father asking that you visit your grandmother, who, your father continues, loves you very much, and, of course, only to visit if you really want to. The caring liberal father, for Zizek, is the truly cruel tyrant: he leaves you no internal room for protest: you have not just to do the thing but to like doing it too.)

   I think there are two ways Rawls might answer Zizek’s renewed challenge. One answer is to deny that the psychological basis for Zizek’s disastrous scenario exists in a Rawlsian society. There is no relevant difference between feeling envious over a just inequality and feeling envious over an unjust inequality, that reply goes, and a just society offers at least as many outlets for such envy—probably more—as any other. At least relatively then, Rawls’s theory does not suffer. A second answer would deny Zizek’s picture of pervasive envy. Not everything that looks like envy is in fact envy, Rawls claims. Sometimes resentment only arises because of a (perceived) lack of fairness. Rawls’ theory being premised on justice as fairness, that kind of resentment would not arise, and so Zizek is wrong in his picture of irrepressible universal envy.

   Those potential answers suggest that underlying the dispute may be two quite different pictures of envy. In Rawls it sometimes appears as something of a last-resort feeling, easily contained when we live an otherwise productive life. For Zizek (perhaps also for Lacan or Freud) it appears fundamental and pugnaciously resistant to rationalist sallies against it. So while Zizek perhaps doesn’t score a significant blow against Rawls’ theory, there remains, at a more foundational level, scope for asking which picture is more faithful to the nature and logic (such as it is) of envy.

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