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Equality,
1, 2002Envy, and the Sense of Injustice 43
RICHARD NORMAN
This paper attempts to defend the value of equality against the accusation that it
is an expression of irrational and disreputable feelings of envy of those who are better off. It
draws on Rawls’ account of the sense of justice to suggest that resentment of inequalities may
be a proper resentment of injustice. The case of resentment of ‘free riders’ is taken as one
plausible example of a justified resentment of those who benefit unfairly from a scheme of
cooperation. Further examples then link the case of the free rider to other cases of unjust
inequalities which are the appropriate objects of resentment and indignation.
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worse off than they are. We could, again, link the contrast between egalitarianism and
prioritarianism with a contrast between two kinds of psychological motivation. Whereas
egalitarianism is motivated by envy, it might be said, prioritarianism is likely to be
motivated by a compassion and concern for the least well off and a wish to better their
condition. And whereas envy is a disreputable emotion, compassion for the least well
off is a morally admirable feeling.
In response to the Envy Objection, egalitarians can and should reply that it simply
begs the question. They may concede that a hostility to inequalities may as a matter of
fact sometimes be motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by envy, but they can add
that this is a contingent psychological fact, that there is no necessary connection
between egalitarianism and envy, and that such a motivation would be a distortion of
a genuinely principled egalitarianism. The desire to reduce or eliminate inequalities is
properly motivated not by envy, but by a sense of injustice. The reason for wanting to
eliminate them is that such inequalities are unjust and therefore wrong. The question
of the wrongness of inequality is logically prior to the question of moral psychology. If
inequalities are indeed unjust, then no further psychological explanation is needed of
why people might object to them. Conversely the advocate of the Envy Objection must
first refute the claim that inequalities are unjust, in order then to maintain that some
further psychological explanation of egalitarianism is needed.
Though that response is essentially correct, it may nevertheless be worth pursuing the
question of moral psychology further. No independent arguments for and against egalitari-
anism appear yet to have been decisive, and the matter remains deeply disputed. The
search for a convincing psychological account of the desire to eliminate inequalities may
therefore add greater plausibility to one side or the other. If we can show that a hostil-
ity to inequalities has affinities with other moral attitudes, this may strengthen the case for
egalitarianism. That is what I shall try to show. I shall attempt to demonstrate: (i) that
resentment of inequalities is akin to the resentment of other states of affairs which are
recognised quite properly to arouse a sense of injustice; and (ii) that this sense of injustice
can in turn be located within a wider family of recognisable and acceptable moral attitudes.
If the argument is successful, then the sense of injustice will be clearly differentiated
from envy, and egalitarianism will not be morally tainted by the association with envy.
1. The Morality of Authority: The child comes to love and trust her parents in response
to their love for her. That love and trust involves a disposition to act in accordance
with the injunctions of her parents, and to feel guilt at her failures to do so.
2. The Morality of Association: As the growing individual comes to participate in various
forms of association and cooperation, beginning with the family and extending out-
wards, and as she finds that she can depend on her fellow-participants, she develops
feelings of friendship and trust towards them. As these ties are established, she tends
to experience feelings of (association) guilt when she fails to do her part, and feelings
of resentment and indignation when others fail to do so (op. cit., pp. 470, 472).
3. The Morality of Principles: At this higher stage the recognition that we and those we
care for are the beneficiaries of an established set of just institutions engenders an
attachment to the principles of justice themselves. The individual who has developed
this attachment will tend to honour her duties and obligations to others even when
she is not bound to them by ties of particular fellow-feeling, and will feel ( principle)
guilt when she fails to do so ( pp. 473–4).
However, friendship is one thing, a recognition of the ties that bind us to fellow-
members of an association is something else. It may be helpful here to distinguish between
feelings of ‘friendship’ and feelings of ‘trust’, which Rawls tends to run together.
Consider the following passage.
I shall now look at a series of cases in which a resentment of injustices can plausibly be
seen to be appropriate. I shall aim to show both that such resentment is morally
acceptable, and that resentment of injustices may properly take the form, in some
cases, of a resentment of inequalities. Consider first what may be intuitively the most
plausible such case, the resentment of free-riding.
Case 1: Suppose that a group of us is engaged in some scheme of co-
operation. Suppose, for instance, that we have a plot of land which we work
and whose products we share. Let us imagine that there are seven of us and
that we agree that we each, one day a week, take our turn at tilling the soil,
planting, weeding, and harvesting. At the end of the year, when the work is
complete and we have each received our share of the produce, we discover
that one of our number, the Free Rider, has consistently failed to do any work
on his allotted day. Because the remaining six of us have done our share, the
necessary work has been done and no one is worse off as a result, but whereas
the rest of us have worked for our share, the Free Rider has reaped the
benefits without making any contribution.
Note first that the case brings out clearly the difference between envy and a resent-
ment of injustice. What we object to is not that the Free Rider has benefited more than
we have, but that he has benefited unfairly. To understand why the resentment is a
resentment of injustice, what is vital is the context of a scheme of co-operation,
involving relations of mutual trust and reliance. What the Free Rider has done is to
violate and abuse that mutual trust, and that is what we resent. Note that the under-
standing of this depends on recognising that the principles of justice which underlie
our resentment are principles of association, and that this underscores my earlier
claims about the link between Rawls’ ‘morality of principles’ and his ‘morality of
association’.
We have seen that those who criticise the resentment of inequalities as a case of
pernicious and irrational envy may point to the fact that no one would be better off if
the resented inequalities were rectified. Could something similar be said of the present
case? We have supposed that because the rest of us have done our share, we still reap
the benefits and are no worse off than we would have been if the Free Rider had made
his contribution, yet our resentment of his failure to contribute is still appropriate. It
may be said that we are worse off, because we have all had to work harder to make up
for his lack of contribution, but we may respond that that is not what we resent; maybe
the extra work for the rest of us is negligible, maybe we do not mind doing it anyway,
but the fact remains that we resent his exploitation of our efforts because of what it
says about his relation to the rest of us. We can imagine a version of the example in
which his failure to contribute imposes no additional burden at all on the rest of us.
Suppose that each of us is allotted not just a day of the week but also a particular task,
and his is to do the weeding, to scare off the birds and to mend the fences so as to keep
out human and other predators. He fails to do this, but as it is his task no one else has
to do it. As it happens, the weeds do not grow enough to damage our crops, and no
predators come, but he has still failed to do his share and though none of us is worse
off as a result, and none of us would have been any better off if he had done his share,
we still properly resent it.
In this respect, then, our resentment of the Free Rider is analogous to resentment of
inequalities in cases where the Levelling Down Objection might be thought to apply. I
want further to suggest that the resemblance is more than just an analogy. In an
important sense our resentment of the Free Rider is a resentment of inequality. Though
the rest of us may be no worse off than we would otherwise have been, the Free Rider
is in one obvious respect better off — both better off than he would otherwise have been,
and better off than the rest of us. Though we all get the benefits of co-operation, just as
we would have done if he had contributed, he gets the benefits of co-operation plus the
additional benefit of not having to contribute. This is an inequality. Does the Levelling
Down Objection apply here? The Free Rider’s failure to contribute may well have
increased the overall net benefit, and an insistence on his contributing might well
reduce the overall net benefit resulting from the scheme of co-operation. If the benefit
which we each get is x and the additional benefit which he gets by not contributing is
y, then the overall net benefit if he contributes is 7x and the overall net benefit if he
does not contribute is 7x + y. Nevertheless his failure to contribute is unjust, and the
unjust inequality is properly resented.
It may be objected that the resentment of injustice in this case is not a resentment of
the inequality, but can be explained in other terms. I have suggested that to under-
stand it we need to look at the context of mutual trust which underpins the
co-operation, and at the way in which that trust has been violated. What might now be
said is that this violation of trust is the breaking of an agreement, a promise or
contract, and that that is the proper object of resentment. What we resent is being
deceived by someone who agreed to contribute and then broke his promise.
That may indeed be a feature of the case, and it may go some of the way to explain
the resentment, but it is not essential to the case. It was indeed a feature of my
description of Case 1, but we can imagine a variant of the example in which it is not
present.
Case 2: This is the same as Case 1, except that the land which is shared and
jointly worked has been handed down from generation to generation over a
long period of time. The co-operative working of the land depends on a tacit
understanding that everyone will do his or her share, but no explicit agree-
ment or promise needs to be made. Imagine then that as in Case 1 the Free
Rider fails to do his share, everyone else contributes, we all benefit from the
co-operation, and the Free Rider additionally benefits by getting his share of
the products of the land without having to contribute.
In such a case the resentment cannot be a resentment of the Free Rider’s having
broken his promise or contravened an agreement, since no promise or agreement is
involved, yet we may still properly resent his failure to contribute his share. It may be
objected however that a crucial feature of the case as I have described it is the existence
of a ‘tacit understanding’ that each will contribute his or her share. Is this not, it may
be said, equivalent to the notion of a tacit agreement or contract, and does this not
after all suggest that the resentment is a resentment of the Free Rider’s failure to abide
by this tacit agreement? There are genuine problems here, of a kind which take us
back, for instance, to Locke’s famous discussion of ‘tacit consent’ [6]. The idea of ‘tacit
consent’, if it is to do any real work, will have to be adequately distinguished from
explicit consent, but the danger is then that what is called tacit consent will cease to be
genuine consent at all. Thus Locke is reduced to saying that one who remains on the
territory of a community has thereby tacitly consented to abide by the rules and accept
the authority of that community. To this we can reply that if in practice I have no
realistic opportunity to leave the territory and settle elsewhere, then I cannot be said genu-
inely to have chosen to live here, and so cannot be said even tacitly to have consented.
These are problems for Locke and the idea of tacit consent, but they are problems
for my case too, for they reveal the pressure to revert to a requirement of explicit consent.
Can we resent the injustice of the Free Rider if there is no explicit agreement which he
has contravened? Suppose that a Residents’ Association is set up in my area and cam-
paigns successfully for the improvement of local amenities, and suppose that, though I
have never agreed to join the Association, I am asked for my subscription and, when
I say that I do not wish to join, am accused of being a Free Rider on the grounds that
I have benefited from the activities of the Association. Can I not properly reply that I
never agreed to join and so have no obligation to contribute? This is why, in order to
distinguish my Case 2 from such cases, we need to posit a tacit understanding that each
person has an obligation to contribute. What, however, are the distinguishing features
of this ‘tacit understanding’, and how are we to set limits to it so that it does not
become, as in the example of the Residents’ Association, a recipe for unjust coercion?
Here is a suggestion: those who themselves make claims of justice are participants in
this tacit understanding, and that is why they are properly resented by others if they fail
to meet the requirements of justice. Thus, in Case 2, if the Free Rider claims his share
of the produce of the land (rather than its simply falling into his lap unrequested), his
failure to contribute can properly be resented as an injustice. This sufficiently distin-
guishes the case from my example of the coercive Residents’ Association. The Free
Rider, if he claims a share of the benefits, is not simply an incidental beneficiary, he is
a participant in the scheme. I think that we can say this without having to invoke any
notion of a promise or consent, and without having to say that what is resented is his
breaking any such promise. What is resented is his wanting to claim the benefits of the
scheme of co-operation with making his contribution, and it is resented because it is an
attempt to take advantage of the other participants and as such is an injustice.
I have said that in Case 1, resentment at the Free Rider’s failure to contribute would
itself be a resentment of an unjust inequality, and the same would hold in Case 2. I
want to move now to cases which we might more naturally think of as cases of resented
inequalities, that is, cases where there are inequalities not of input but of outcomes.
Consider the following case.
Case 3: As Case 2, except that all participants make their equal contribution to
the scheme of co-operation, but one of them gains a greater share of the prod-
ucts of their co-operation than the others.
As so described, the case does no more than to signal the symmetry between in-
equalities of contribution and inequalities in the benefits which are gained. What we
need to consider further is how something like Case 3 might come about in practice,
and it is at first difficult to see how this might happen, and might be a proper occasion
for resentment, other than by the employment of force or fraud on the part of the
person who derives greater benefits. It might well be, of course, that the other particip-
ants all voluntarily agree to give one person a greater share. Their reasons for doing
so might themselves be reasons of justice; they might, for instance, agree to his having
a greater share on the grounds that his needs are greater than those of his fellows.
Alternatively, their willingness to give him a greater share might simply be an expres-
sion of his popularity or their affection for him, and in such a case questions of the
justice of his greater share would not arise. In either case, however, if they willingly
choose to give him a greater share of the benefits, they will presumably not resent it,
nor would they have reason to do so. We seem then to be left only with cases of force
or fraud as the cases where the inequality would be resented; perhaps the person who
benefits unequally does so because, when it is his turn to help with the harvesting, he
secretly sets aside a portion for himself without telling the others, or perhaps he simply
takes some of their share by force or by the use of threats. If that is how the inequality
comes about, however, then what the others would naturally resent would be the
employment of force or fraud, and it is difficult to see how we could distinguish a
separate resentment which is the resentment of the unequal distribution.
Are there any other ways in which an inequality of benefits could come about?
Consider this possibility.
Case 4: Instead of working the land in common, the participants in the scheme
divide up the land equally between them, and their co-operation extends only
to the mutual protection of their ownership of their plots. Through a com-
bination of luck and hard work, some of them then get much better returns
from their land than others.
This is the kind of case which libertarian opponents of egalitarianism typically have in
mind. They will proceed to maintain, very plausibly, that in such a case there are no
grounds for justified resentment on the part of those who benefit less. Any resentment
on their part would indeed look like mere envy. This is where we encounter the second
of my two problems about the scope of justice. The assumption which underpins my
approach to the cases which I have been considering is that the proper objects of
egalitarian distribution are the benefits and burdens of social co-operation. In Case 4 it
can plausibly be maintained that the greater benefits which some enjoy fall outside the
scope of social co-operation, that they are therefore not subject to any requirement of
equal distribution, and hence that they are not properly the object of any feeling of
resentment which can plausibly be regarded as the expression of a sense of injustice.
That is why, in this case, any resentment looks more like an expression of envy.
All the cases which I have considered so far are deliberately simple and small-scale.
That is what enables us to see relatively clearly where and how the requirements of
justice and equality apply or, apparently in Case 4, do not apply. Suppose we now
build a greater degree of complexity into our examples.
Case 5: As in Case 4, individuals own land from which they reap the benefits,
but their ability to do so on a large scale now depends on a complex division
of labour which introduces many other roles into the scheme of co-operation.
There are agents of law enforcement (police, lawyers etc.) who protect their
ownership of their land. There are wage labourers who are paid to help work
the land. There are various institutions which help to facilitate the functioning
of a system of wage labour, including banks, employment agencies, and a
public system of education. There are institutions of economic exchange and
trade, requiring merchants, retailers, people to build roads and to provide
transport, and so on. Let us suppose that, as in Case 4, some owners of land
are more prosperous than others, but also that they are more prosperous than
many of the people who perform other roles, such as the wage labourers.
Our example is obviously beginning to acquire some of the features of the real world
of a national economy. The point to be drawn from considering it, for the purposes of
my argument, is that the scope of social co-operation, and thus the scope of social justice,
is greatly enlarged. Some of the landowners may, as in Case 4, do better than others, and
that may again be in part because of their greater efforts, but the part that their own
efforts can play in determining the extent of their success is now to a much greater extent
dependent on and conditioned by the efforts of others. Their greater success may also
be in part a matter of luck, but in comparison with Case 4 a different kind of luck now
comes into play, not the fortuitous effects of natural circumstances, but the fact that com-
plex social institutions which, in virtue of their complexity, elude conscious human control
turn out to favour some more than others. (To take just one obvious example, think of
the ways in which some gain and others lose from the fluctuating prices of land or pro-
perty or commodities.) In such a context, resentment at inequalities need no longer be
seen, as in Case 4, as mere envy of the good fortune and hard work of others. It can be
understood as resentment at the fact that some benefit more than others from a system
of social co-operation in which all participate. It can be understood as a resentment of
injustice. In that respect it is akin to Case 3 rather than Case 4, but introducing the
complexities of the division of labour enables us to see how inequalities of benefit can
come about without the employment of force or fraud by those who benefit more.
Libertarian critics would want to break down the complexities of social co-operation
and the division of labour into individual person-to-person transactions. They would
then argue that the sets of benefits which individuals derive from the system are simply
the sum of the benefits deriving from each individual transaction, and hence that so
long as each transaction takes place without force or fraud, no injustice has occurred,
whatever the cumulative outcome. This seems to me to distort the character of the
complexities of social co-operation. The institutions which we are considering are
typically ones which confer an irreducibly collective benefit, which cannot be broken
down into the individual benefits of individual exchanges. That is not to say that
establishing the scope of social co-operation is a simple matter. The problem is pre-
cisely that in a large-scale society with a complex division of labour the effects of
individual effort, of natural luck, and of the uncontrolled workings of social institutions
are inextricably intertwined. It is consequently impossible to say how much of people’s
differential success is due to the workings of these various factors. All that we can say
is that, in general terms, we know that all these factors are likely to be involved, and
the extent to which we want to insist on the requirements of egalitarian justice should
reflect our general awareness of the roles which these different factors play. We can
perhaps less easily justify the strict application of a simple principle of equal distribu-
tion of benefits and burdens such as would be appropriate in our earlier cases. The fact
remains however that in Case 5 the benefits which people enjoy are in large part the
benefits of social co-operation, they are therefore subject to the requirements of just
distribution, and resentment at unequal distribution may therefore be the expression of
a sense of injustice.
My final case is, strictly speaking, not distinct from its predecessor, but simply high-
lights a further typical feature of the latter.
acquire more material benefits than others. Their greater wealth in turn gives
them greater power, which in turn enables them to acquire yet more wealth.
For instance, wealthy landowners are able to acquire more land, and, the
more land they own, the more they are in a position to dictate the terms of
employment to those whom they employ as wage-labourers, and to do so for
their own advantage.
I turn finally to my second aim, of showing that such resentment has a place within a
larger family of recognisable and acceptable moral responses and attitudes. I have
described the Free Rider as ‘taking advantage of ’ his fellow-participants (p. 49), and of
doing so in a way which exploits the relations of mutual trust and cooperation between
them. That way of putting it draws on my assertion, in my discussion of Rawls, of the
continuity between the morality of association and the morality of principles. With my
discussion of Case 2 I have attempted to show that we can describe the injustice in that
way without its necessarily involving the breaking of a promise or an agreement, and
with the discussion of Cases 5 and 6 I have likewise tried to show that the injustice
which is resented need not involve the employment of fraud or overt force to obtain
unequal advantages.
I suggest that the resentment of inequalities which I have identified and described
belongs within a recognisably Kantian family of moral attitudes. It is a response to being
treated as a means. In saying that, I am not suggesting that we can simply take the
second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, apply it to our cases, and read off the
implications. Kant’s talk of treating people as means and as ends is itself notoriously
difficult to pin down, and it is more a matter of exploring examples such as the ones we
have been considering in order to give clarity and substance to Kant’s principle. I have
distinguished resentment at inequalities from resentment at the breaking of a promise
or an agreement, and from resentment at being the victim of force or fraud, but we can
also recognise affinities between these cases, and by doing so we can begin to make
sense of the idea of being used as a thing in contrast to being respected as a person.
Kant’s formulation is: “So act as to treat humanity . . . never solely as a means but
always also as an end” (my italics). The terms ‘solely’ and ‘also’ are a necessary
reminder that in the normal transactions of everyday life we are constantly making use
of other people, and that life would be impossible otherwise. What is wrong, according
to Kant, is not the simple act of using people, but doing so in ways which fail to
respect the fact that they are independent persons with their own purposes and inter-
ests. This might be thought to count against my Kantian reading of the resentment of
inequalities, for though it could perhaps be said that in the extreme case the Free Rider
is treating others solely as means, it would be difficult to make the same claim about the
beneficiaries of inequalities in Cases 5 and 6. We are envisaging people who, though
they may use their positions of power to acquire greater material wealth than others,
may well in their day-to-day dealings with others treat with kindness and respect those
from whom they benefit.
I think that Kant is wrong to imply that, provided one treats another to some extent
as an end, one thereby escapes censure for treating the other as a means. What we
need is not an either/or contrast, but a sliding scale: the more one treats another as a
means to be used, the more one’s treatment of the other is wrong and is properly
resented. There is of course no mathematical formula for measuring the degrees to
which people are used as means, but commonsense indicates that we can make rough
comparisons and contrasts. Consider at one extreme the teacher whose students are
the means by which she earns her livelihood but whose primary concern in all her
dealings with them is to serve their interests and respect their autonomy. Consider at
the other extreme the slaveowner who treats his slaves well, gives them enough to eat,
does not physically abuse them, and allows them their amusements, but for whom they
remain slaves. It is clear that the teacher’s students, as so described, have no grounds
for resentment at being used as means, whereas the slaves have every reason for
resenting their being used as slaves. If they did not resent their status, this would itself
be a lack on their part, and we should have to say, perhaps, that their spirit had been
broken, or that they had internalised the attitudes of their owners. Where, on this
continuum, should we place the resentment of inequalities? In the absence of a precise
metric, my claim is that it comes somewhere between those extremes.
The sense of injustice, then, has its place within a familiar and reputable set of moral
dispositions and responses. It need not be a dominant place. Nietzsche reminds us that
Richard Norman, School of European Culture and Languages, Cornwallis Building, University
of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF, UK. R.J.Norman@ukc.ac.uk
NOTES
[1] The criticism tends to take the form of incidental asides rather than a developed argument. J. R. L for
instance, in his classic 1965 paper Against equality (Philosophy Vol. XL, p. 296) says: “There are problems
enough in all conscience, to occupy our minds for the rest of this century, without inculcating in each
man’s breast a feeling of resentment because in some respect or other he compares unfavourably with
someone else.” Contributors to the 1983 volume Against Equality edited by William Letwin ( London and
Basingstoke, Macmillan) refer to arguments for equality as “invok[ing] the latent feelings of envy present
in most societies at most times” (p. 259) and as “the articulation of envy and resentment in the name of
equality” ( p. 382). A recent attack on egalitarianism which makes much of the claim that it is ‘based on
envy’ is C B and P H, Equity as a Social Goal (Wellington, New Zealand, New
Zealand Business Round Table, 2000, e.g. pp. 5, 8, 138, 233).
[2] A limited case for equality is made on these lines in R. M. H, Justice and equality, in J A and
W S, eds. (1978) Justice and Economic Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., ), p. 126. R
N, in an interesting discussion in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, Basic Books, 1974,
pp. 239–46), criticizes the claim that greater equality would reduce envy.
[3] The label ‘the Levelling Down Objection’ was coined in D P’s 1991 Lindley Lecture Equality or
Priority? (reprinted in M C and A W, eds., The Ideal of Equality, Basingstoke
and New York, Macmillan, 2000 — see p. 98), and Parfit’s formulation has prompted much recent
discussion. A shortened version of the lecture is in Andrew Mason, ed., Ideals of Equality (Oxford, Blackwell,
1998).
[4] Parfit, in C and W, op. cit., p. 101, and in Mason, op. cit., p. 12.
[5] J R, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 484.
[6] J L, Second Treatise of Civil Government, para. 119.