Equality Nothing Everything

How much does a train driver deserve to be paid? How many infant deaths per anuum do we accept when building a new road? What is the acceptable trade-off between health and safety regulation and efficiency? What is the right balance between life and work?

These cost-benefit questions are ‘wicked problems’, made difficult by the opacity of the terms on each side of the equation. We cannot put an objective price on children’s lives relative to the convenience of drivers, nor can we ascertain how much someone’s labour would be worth if they lived alone on a desert island. This opacity leads social planners and political theorists into three different strategies:

1. Set the balance at equality. Everyone should be paid the same amount; everyone should have the same access to healthcare; immigration should be allowed equally from all countries; all parts of a country should have the same road access; product prices should be uniform and consistent at all times and places.

2. Set the balance at nothing . No-one should be at risk when walking to school; no-one should go to prison; no-one should die of this or that disease; there should be no violence from the state; all products should be free; there should be no human interference in nature whatsoever; there should be no immigration.
3. Set the balance at everything . That is, there should be no social planning: we will leave the risk of smoking to organic processes; we will let go of the differential in wages; the changes in cost of products; the creation or policing of borders; and the dangers of different diseases.

Whilst crude, these heuristics have the benefit of appearing objective, unambiguous, and easy to defend. You are immune to salami-tactics: “If 10 deaths per year is acceptable, why not 9, or 7, or x?” They are natural attractors for political argument: we want to say “not at all” or “whatever goes” or “nothing less than equality” because it appears consistent and rational.

In the absence of these attractors, we enter a quagmire of arbitrariness. Why 9 and not 7? Really, 5, isn’t that a little high… or low? There are limited ways to produce intermediate trade-offs which are discursively valid:

1. Convention. Fix the trade-off using conventions which derive legitimacy independently from their ‘reason.’ The convention can be set historically (traditional customs) or procedurally (legally/administratively). As customary understandings break down, we need to rely increasingly on norms of procedure.
2. Preferences. Set the trade-off using the aggregate personal choices of those concerned. One method is democratic: establish a rough weighting via an extremely noisy voting process, and then work out the precise levels bureaucratically. Another is economic: allow those concerned to express their preferences with their wallets. Here, money becomes the universal medium of relative assessment.
3. Rational Planning. Deny there is a vacuum of reason and assert that values are commensurable.
1. Method 1: carefully construct, via thought experiments, lexical hierarchy of values (thereby enabling more precise zero, nothing, everything assessments), and ensure, via analogy and arguments of internal consistency, that any particular decision, even if arbitrary, is at least consistent.
2. Method 2: determine some non-monetary universal medium of assessment for all possible values. For example, ‘euphorium’ or whatever it is that utility constitutes. Find a way of measuring this and engage in top-down planning as necessary.
4. Abundance. Hope that technological progress and rational planning will remove all truly painful tradeoffs (e.g., between who lives and dies, who is healthy and who is sick), leaving merely hedonic-treadmill-esque ‘how comes the Jones’s get two planets and I only get one?’