Previous problem of utilitarianism here. Next problem of utilitarianism here.
The Rawlsian conception of a just society is incompatible with Parfit's extension of utilitarianism.
Rawls claimed that a just society was necessarily a very egalitarian one. His argument was that if you were going to be placed into a society without knowing ahead of time what your role would be, if you're smart, you would want a society where there's not much difference between the guy at the top, and the guy at the bottom. That is to say: sure it would be a blast to be a plantation-owner in the antebellum American South, but if you fell out of the sky at random into a role in that society, chances are much greater you'd end up as a slave or tenant farmer breaking your back for one of the plantation owners.(1)
Parfit extended utilitarianism by saying that if we want the greatest good for the greatest number, we should want not just more happiness, but more people. The equation is average happiness of each person * # people = total amount of happiness. In this view, having more people to be experiencing some happiness can even counterbalance the amount of happiness that each person is experiencing. Another way of saying this: if utilitarianism is the greatest good for the greatest number, don't neglect the "number" part.
The full elaboration of this claim runs counter to most people's moral intuitions and lead to what's known as the repugnant conclusion (summarized below).
Imagine two societies: a society of a million people who have the best lives possible, whose lives are 99% worth living. (I don't know, sometimes it's cloudy when they go to the beach, otherwise life is perfect.) Compare that to a society of a hundred million whose lives are only 1% better than death: they groan each day under the oppressive weight of a dictatorship, but sometimes see a nice flower, which keeps them from wanting to kill themselves.(2) Because 99% * a million is less overall happiness than 1% * a hundred million, the repugnant conclusion according to Parfit's interpretation of utilitarianism, is that it's better to have the much bigger, much less happy society.
The obvious rejection is that an individual experiences individual happiness - total happiness is not something that is experienced - and the individual experience of objective happiness is what matters. Of course, if you make that claim, you're arguing against utilitarianism.
To illustrate Parfit's repugnant conclusion concretely in contrast to Rawls, let's apply it to a real historical situation, the concrete example of black slavery in the United States. Of course the QALY (quality-adjusted life years) measurements for utility will necessarily be a little fudged. On the eve of the American Civil War in 1860, the census showed 3,953,761 slaves in the United States. Let's round that up to four million and assume these people had lives 1% worth living(3)
(after all they're literally in the horrible dictatorship that I described above.) [Added later: the very next day after I wrote this post, I ran across Robin Hanson's blog post "Power Corrupts, Slavery Edition" which contains the statement "US south slave plantations were quite literally small totalitarian governments".] Now let's compare that to Avalon on the California island of Catalina. Ever been there? It's really nice, as you might expect, and has a population of just under 4,000, and while it's not completely egalitarian, you can't be bought or killed with impunity. It's a really nice place, so let's assume there's 99% average happiness. Parfit concludes that it's better to have that slave society than modern Avalon.
By Parfit's interpretation of utilitarianism, the problem is not the institution of slavery's impact on quality of life, as long as we can overcome this by having enough slaves. Rawls could never recommend choosing a slave society over a non-slave society ("well how big a slave society is it?" the repugnant conclusion says you should ask.) By Rawls (and most of our intuitions) the answer of which you would rather be randomly thrown into is obvious, and wholly contingent on whether moral value comes from some abstract total register of utility points, or the experienced utility of an individual human being. Since policy makers do these calculations to make decisions, this absurd conclusion could conceivably make a difference, and some respected thinkers (Bryan Caplan and Michael Huemer among them) have argued that our intuitions are wrong.
Of course the counterargument is: if individually experienced utility is all that matters, isn't it better to have one really happy person then two ho-hum people? Shouldn't we feed the utility monster then? I don't know, other than to say fatalistically, that possibly moral reasoning either is not a real process, and that we are unable to make decisions like this about groups of people that we do not know. Which would be terrible, considering that modern societies are forced to do so all the time. But it would be consistent with Adam Smith's thought experiment about losing a single joint of a finger versus an earthquake in China that kills a hundred thousand. Humans cannot reason about abstract people as moral agents, because we did not evolve with a need to do so - other than as threats or trade partners.
NOTES
1. Rawls also suffers from the problem of differing agents: assume that someone doesn't care about relative status, only absolute comforts. If such a person gets his head frozen and wakes up in a future where there are absolute un-displaceable overlords but who give them amazing experiences and material comfort, that person might not care, even though someone else might chafe under such an uber nanny-state regime. I also wonder how meaningful the question of a choice can be, because there is no neutral position to choose from and all are habituated to the specifics of times and places. I.e., to me England appears a nightmarish dystopia but the people I've met from there seem to be reasonable people who enjoy their lives and even return there voluntarily, so who knows.
2. If you think assigning numbers to such situations is spurious and academic, I'm afraid I must inform you that they are very concrete and very real-world, as health systems use units of DALYs and QALYs all the time to make decisions. And some systems do assign negative values, meaning that some conditions are considered to make life not worth living, i.e. they are literally worse than death.
3. I tried to look up the suicide rate for slaves, as this would give an idea of how many slaves thought their life was not worth living. Although I couldn't find numbers, apparently suicide was unexpectedly rare, and the threat of execution by owners would not have been an effective deterrent for slaves who
thought continued slavery was worse than death. In several places (e.g. here) I saw an article referenced: David Lester, Center for the Study of Suicide, "Suicidal Behavior in African-American Slaves," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 37:1 (1998), 1-13.
Showing posts with label rawls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rawls. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Problems of Utilitarianism #1: Real Utility Monsters
Next problem of utilitarianism here.
Utilitarianism is often formulated as the claim: "The best society is the one with the greatest good for the greatest number."
There are many problems with this, first and foremost is that such an abstract formulation submerges the question of how to achieve and maintain this. To make this concrete, it doesn't even distinguish between radical capitalism and radical communism.
But another problem troubles it, one which crops up in multiple places in reasoning about moral societies: the problem of differing agency. Many of us understand on some level how troubling this is to the Enlightenment project of organizing societies, and this is evident in our discomfort discussing (for instance) behavioral genetics.
Here is an innocuous case of differing agency - one might call it trivially differing agency - that is not problematic for utilitarianism: I kind of like chicken. But my wife really likes chicken. If we get to the end of the meal and there's one piece of chicken left, the obvious best choice is to give it to her, because there will be more happiness in the world if she eats it. In the same way, I once refused a free ticket to a PGA tour event because I can't stand golf, and it is almost certainly true that whoever got that ticket instead of me, they enjoyed the event more. My taking up a spot at such an event would be an anti-utilitarian travesty.
Differing agency remains innocuous only so long as agents differ somewhat randomly in their specific tastes but not on average in the intensity of their pleasure and suffering. To illustrate this problem, Robert Nozick imagined a utility monster, that would always derive more enjoyment from everything. It doesn't habituate, it has no hedonic treadmill. You could imagine the utility monster as some kind of hedonistic superintelligent alien that had come to Earth to experience chocolate ice cream and massages, and experience them it does, on wondrous levels of ecstasy we can't begin to imagine. To it, we are as dim beasts, barely able to register pleasure compared to the raptures that the monster can attain. If we are true utilitarians, we always have to give our chicken and golf tickets (and chocolate ice cream and massages) to the utility monster. (Let's assume it's a nice utility monster that doesn't destroy things like the one below, it just likes the things we like, more than we like them, which is still a big problem.)
Not exactly how Nozick imagined it, but hey it's funny.
From Existential Comics
My gut reaction is that we don't have such an obligation, but I can't see why we shouldn't, if utilitarianism is correct.
Of note, Nozick also critiqued the Rawlsian conception of a just society, but there is a further critique of Nozick in the instantiation of societies of humans, which again relies on the actual differing capacities of humans that affect the quality of their agency. And despite heroic efforts to create equal agents, humans continue to stratify themselves based on these differing qualities.
Utilitarianism is often formulated as the claim: "The best society is the one with the greatest good for the greatest number."
There are many problems with this, first and foremost is that such an abstract formulation submerges the question of how to achieve and maintain this. To make this concrete, it doesn't even distinguish between radical capitalism and radical communism.
But another problem troubles it, one which crops up in multiple places in reasoning about moral societies: the problem of differing agency. Many of us understand on some level how troubling this is to the Enlightenment project of organizing societies, and this is evident in our discomfort discussing (for instance) behavioral genetics.
Here is an innocuous case of differing agency - one might call it trivially differing agency - that is not problematic for utilitarianism: I kind of like chicken. But my wife really likes chicken. If we get to the end of the meal and there's one piece of chicken left, the obvious best choice is to give it to her, because there will be more happiness in the world if she eats it. In the same way, I once refused a free ticket to a PGA tour event because I can't stand golf, and it is almost certainly true that whoever got that ticket instead of me, they enjoyed the event more. My taking up a spot at such an event would be an anti-utilitarian travesty.
Differing agency remains innocuous only so long as agents differ somewhat randomly in their specific tastes but not on average in the intensity of their pleasure and suffering. To illustrate this problem, Robert Nozick imagined a utility monster, that would always derive more enjoyment from everything. It doesn't habituate, it has no hedonic treadmill. You could imagine the utility monster as some kind of hedonistic superintelligent alien that had come to Earth to experience chocolate ice cream and massages, and experience them it does, on wondrous levels of ecstasy we can't begin to imagine. To it, we are as dim beasts, barely able to register pleasure compared to the raptures that the monster can attain. If we are true utilitarians, we always have to give our chicken and golf tickets (and chocolate ice cream and massages) to the utility monster. (Let's assume it's a nice utility monster that doesn't destroy things like the one below, it just likes the things we like, more than we like them, which is still a big problem.)
Not exactly how Nozick imagined it, but hey it's funny.
From Existential Comics
My gut reaction is that we don't have such an obligation, but I can't see why we shouldn't, if utilitarianism is correct.
Of note, Nozick also critiqued the Rawlsian conception of a just society, but there is a further critique of Nozick in the instantiation of societies of humans, which again relies on the actual differing capacities of humans that affect the quality of their agency. And despite heroic efforts to create equal agents, humans continue to stratify themselves based on these differing qualities.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Three Thought Experiments About Wealth Distribution
Rawlsian, Nozickian, and Mischelian Worlds
In A Theory of Justice John Rawls famously argued that the just society is necessarily one in which the society's architects do not know ahead of time what their roles will be in it. If we don't know what our role will be in a society that we're going to be part of, rationally self-interested decision-makers would choose to create and be part of a society with a very egalitarian distribution of power. It might have been fun to be a plantation owner in the antebellum American South or a patrician in Rome, but if you fell out of the sky randomly into a social role in either place, chances were much greater in both cases that you would be a slave. The implication is that society-designers with foreknowledge are suspect because they can bias the game in their favor; even Thomas Jefferson surely believed that a man like himself would prosper in the kind of nation he was designing.
Robert Nozick took issue with the idea that the distribution of power in a just society would be close to egalitarian. He argued that if you can get from that just, egalitarian distribution to a non-egalitarian distribution through steps that are all just and un-coerced on their own, the resulting society must be just as well, even if it is no longer egalitarian. Making the thought experiment concerete: imagine an egalitarian Rawlsian world of a million people where everyone has $100,000, and one of these million is a gifted pianist named Steve. Word of Steve's amazing talent spreads, and he gives a concert attended by all his fellow citizens, all of whom gladly pay a dollar for the experience of hearing him play. Afterward, Steve has $1,099,999, and everyone else has $99,999. Steve is now the richest person in the world by a factor of 11. Is this unjust? If so, exactly which of these voluntary steps was the unjust step in moving from the Rawlsian to the Nozickian world?
A dimension which Nozick did not consider but which might affect the moral equation is the degree to which rational decision-makers vary in their abilities to make those decisions. Imagine after the first performance, all of Steve's fellow citizens are satisfied that they got their money's worth, but most of them say "once is enough." Some fraction of his audience was so moved that they go to a second performance of the same piece. Steve gets richer, and the repeat customers get another dollar poorer. Eventually his audience is reduced to a group of hardcore loyalists who find his performances so powerful, so emotionally rich, that nothing else in their lives compares, and they cease caring about anything else; they go to all his performances, they buy concert T-shirts, etc. and their wealth is transferred a dollar at a time (or more, if the pianist raises his prices) to the pianist, until they are broke. Whether or not Steve is aware of his role in their destitution is an interesting but separate question; for the time being let's say the lights in the concert hall are such that Steve can't see that he's reduced his fans to rags and bones, and he doesn't mingle after the shows. We can call this world the Mischelian world.
The dimension that Rawls and Nozick neglected in their thought experiments is variation of self-interested decision-making ability among the agents in the experiments (which may be transmissible across generations). If we add to the agents of the Nozickian world a distribution of rationally self-interested decision-making ability, we create the the Mischelian world described above. In the Mischelian world, some agents will be consistently better able to act in their rational self-interest because of superior working memory, rationality, critical thinking, or ability to delay gratification, and this will have an impact on the preservation of their material resources and the subsequent distribution thereof, all without any coercion. For those of us in liberal democracies, this is the world in which we are now living. Whether these traits are dictated by genetics or upbringing is irrelevant - what's relevant morally is that where agents fall along the distribution of these characteristics is not under the control of the agents, or for that matter of the Jeffersons designing new societies (not yet anyway.)
What Happens to Theories of Justice When the Agents Differ in Important Ways?
There are interesting implications for policy that fall out of these experiments, practical as much as moral, and they offer unpleasant suggestions to both side of the political spectrum. Perhaps most poignantly to redistributivists, it was a socialist (George Orwell) who pointed out in fiction the stubborn re-emergence of class structures in human societies even after violent attempts to cleanse it had been executed. (The "Inner Party"; hence members of the Chinese Communist Party explaining, with no hint of irony, why the uneducated rubes working in the factories and fields cannot be trusted with free elections and free speech.) This certainly seems to be bad news for attempts at economically egalitarian societies. This tendency of class structures to resist disturbance seems to be a socioeconomic parallel to Le Châtelier's principle: class re-emerges even where strong efforts have been made to obliterate it, even if the new structure rests on slightly different characteristics - blood relationships, ability to amass wealth, maneuver in bureaucratic hierarchies, or to parrot dogma as a loyalty signal have all been criteria for these structures at various points in history, including now. There are not many people who believe that individual differences do not matter to economic success, and that individual differences appear entirely randomly across populations rather than in consistent, inter-generationally robust association - the disagreement tends to be over the mechanism that made the agents different (i.e. whether due to upbringing, opportunities, genetics, etc.) Even Marx had to recognize that individuals could not be expected to produce incommensurate with their ability. Therefore, it's hard to see how strongly wealth-redistributive policies could matter unless they were carried out continuously. In that case, it is also very hard to see why this would not necessarily result in overall slowing of economic growth and therefore, less happiness for everyone.
Some implications of the Mischelian world are not entirely pleasant to the more libertarian among us either, as they justify some degree of paternalism. All but the most absolutist libertarian concedes that there is a cut-off in the distribution of rational decision-making ability, beyond which individuals cannot be responsible only and entirely for him or herself. If you went to Steve the pianist's concerts and found that there were children or retarded or senile or insane people spending their last dimes on him, would you be comfortable with that? What if they were "normal", but instead of piano concertos Steve were selling lots in gambling games, or opium, or sexual acts? All of us have more trouble behaving with rational self-interest with certain goods and services. Keep in mind, the question is whether a just society allows Steve to sell such things, not whether he is moral in doing so - if indeed there is a difference between those two questions. If legal distinctions limiting commerce and other types of decision-making responsibility are seen as necessary for justice in a Mischelian world, this could ironically be seen simultaneously as a justification for elitism and paternalism as well as a reward for less responsible, productive agents.
Perhaps the solution in the Mischelian world is to define a cut-off for humans at the margins of rational decision-making ability, and then keep them being responsible for their decisions. In fact in our own Mischelian world, that's exactly what we do, for children and the mentally disabled, though especially with children we don't have the means or resources to determine exactly where each individual's rationality falls at every age. So, in most countries we arbitrarily choose an age of majority. (Straight-ahead as it seems, this practice is still attacked, as you can see with one hot-under-the-collar commenter at my outdoor-activities blog.)
The problem with cut-offs (of products - "alcohol isn't addictive and harmful enough to ban, but heroin is") or agents ("my daughter is only 14 but she's mature enough to be allowed to drive") is that they're coarse-grained approximations (often using proxy indicators like age), and in fact even if we're not below the lower cut-off on the rational decision-making spectrum, there are no doubt lots of people with overall better rational decision-making capabilities than us. These cut-offs are also based on rational decision-making over the long-term, which is often obvious after brief interactions (with the retarded or demented) but not always. Should a just society require you to assess the rationality of everyone with whom you engage in commerce, or of the particular decisions involving this particular transaction? When I was in college, a mom-and-pop sandwich shop opened up that had 25-cent burger specials on Friday nights. Like every other bottomless-stomached college student, I showed up every Friday and got in line and ordered 6 of them. Eventually they put up a sign asking us to please consider ordering something else because they lost money on every burger. Of course, we all had a good laugh at this, and ordered more burgers, and soon after they closed. Clearly their belief that our good hearts would prevent us from taking advantage of their kindness was false, and we knew it. Should they have been protected from making this decision, or from us mean students from taking advantage of them? Having met the couple and talked to them briefly, I can attest that they seemed non-retarded and non-demented, but I still might be smarter than them. Does that make a difference? Should we be protected, from heroin or from Steve's heart-rending performances (or should the more rational people be handicapped?) Is the cut-off for children and the disabled only a result of our limited methods and resources? That is to say, in a future of finer-grained social justice, is it desirable for technology to allow us a gradient of protection for individuals who are even a little bit unable to control themselves in certain circumstances, for example your blogger who has confessed to his chocoholism?
The issue with the Mischelian world is that there are differences between the agents that make up these societies that result from nature and are not eliminable by the application of justice (not yet), even though they definitely affect whether a just state obtains. It also seems that the coarse-grained nature of the way we protect the irrational from injustice results only from limitations in technology and resources, rather than from a positive decision that our protections should be only so detailed, and not go further. I believe the discussion will proceed in this century, and if it goes far enough in my own lifetime, Safeway will start refusing to sell me Kit Kats.
Conclusion: Wealth is Only a Contributor to Utility, But So Is Genetics
It seems obvious that the reason anyone cares about economic egalitarianism is because wealth relates to utility; that is, wealth is a proxy indicator of happiness, which is what we care about and why you're reading this. It is not clear that there can be such a thing as a just society that cares about economic equality but not utility equality. Gross National Happiness is the best known direct quantitative indicator of utility. As with wealth, utility is in part dependent on agent-specific traits which differ along a spectrum, and there is some indication that there is such a thing as a happiness set point. Needless to say, like many factors influencing rationality, happiness set point is a given, not subject to the decisions of a just society but absolutely impacting them. In a just society, do the naturally happier individuals owe cheering-up efforts to the naturally sadder? To refer to another of Nozick's thought experiments, in a sense the individuals at the low end of the happiness set-point curve, in a just society that works to raise their utility, are anti-utility monsters: in an effort to bring the unhappiest up to a certain cut-off point, the utility of the happier is consumed, and overall utility decreases.
Finally, I have alluded twice to our sense of justice not yet being able to eliminate these differences and therefore having to enact justice in the way society deals with the hands that its agents are dealt. It is my sense at least in the U.S. that those who are most in favor of wealth-redistributive policies are likely to be the most strongly opposed to even investigating whether there is a genetic basis for the rationality differences between agents, much less whether our sense of justice dictates that we do something to improve them. Such differences could certainly not be the only reasons for the persistence of inequality, but if they exist they would certainly be a root cause. In the coming decades we will understand much more about the genetics of cognition, and going forward, policy discussions about wealth inequality must make reference to these findings.
In A Theory of Justice John Rawls famously argued that the just society is necessarily one in which the society's architects do not know ahead of time what their roles will be in it. If we don't know what our role will be in a society that we're going to be part of, rationally self-interested decision-makers would choose to create and be part of a society with a very egalitarian distribution of power. It might have been fun to be a plantation owner in the antebellum American South or a patrician in Rome, but if you fell out of the sky randomly into a social role in either place, chances were much greater in both cases that you would be a slave. The implication is that society-designers with foreknowledge are suspect because they can bias the game in their favor; even Thomas Jefferson surely believed that a man like himself would prosper in the kind of nation he was designing.
Robert Nozick took issue with the idea that the distribution of power in a just society would be close to egalitarian. He argued that if you can get from that just, egalitarian distribution to a non-egalitarian distribution through steps that are all just and un-coerced on their own, the resulting society must be just as well, even if it is no longer egalitarian. Making the thought experiment concerete: imagine an egalitarian Rawlsian world of a million people where everyone has $100,000, and one of these million is a gifted pianist named Steve. Word of Steve's amazing talent spreads, and he gives a concert attended by all his fellow citizens, all of whom gladly pay a dollar for the experience of hearing him play. Afterward, Steve has $1,099,999, and everyone else has $99,999. Steve is now the richest person in the world by a factor of 11. Is this unjust? If so, exactly which of these voluntary steps was the unjust step in moving from the Rawlsian to the Nozickian world?
A dimension which Nozick did not consider but which might affect the moral equation is the degree to which rational decision-makers vary in their abilities to make those decisions. Imagine after the first performance, all of Steve's fellow citizens are satisfied that they got their money's worth, but most of them say "once is enough." Some fraction of his audience was so moved that they go to a second performance of the same piece. Steve gets richer, and the repeat customers get another dollar poorer. Eventually his audience is reduced to a group of hardcore loyalists who find his performances so powerful, so emotionally rich, that nothing else in their lives compares, and they cease caring about anything else; they go to all his performances, they buy concert T-shirts, etc. and their wealth is transferred a dollar at a time (or more, if the pianist raises his prices) to the pianist, until they are broke. Whether or not Steve is aware of his role in their destitution is an interesting but separate question; for the time being let's say the lights in the concert hall are such that Steve can't see that he's reduced his fans to rags and bones, and he doesn't mingle after the shows. We can call this world the Mischelian world.
The dimension that Rawls and Nozick neglected in their thought experiments is variation of self-interested decision-making ability among the agents in the experiments (which may be transmissible across generations). If we add to the agents of the Nozickian world a distribution of rationally self-interested decision-making ability, we create the the Mischelian world described above. In the Mischelian world, some agents will be consistently better able to act in their rational self-interest because of superior working memory, rationality, critical thinking, or ability to delay gratification, and this will have an impact on the preservation of their material resources and the subsequent distribution thereof, all without any coercion. For those of us in liberal democracies, this is the world in which we are now living. Whether these traits are dictated by genetics or upbringing is irrelevant - what's relevant morally is that where agents fall along the distribution of these characteristics is not under the control of the agents, or for that matter of the Jeffersons designing new societies (not yet anyway.)
What Happens to Theories of Justice When the Agents Differ in Important Ways?
There are interesting implications for policy that fall out of these experiments, practical as much as moral, and they offer unpleasant suggestions to both side of the political spectrum. Perhaps most poignantly to redistributivists, it was a socialist (George Orwell) who pointed out in fiction the stubborn re-emergence of class structures in human societies even after violent attempts to cleanse it had been executed. (The "Inner Party"; hence members of the Chinese Communist Party explaining, with no hint of irony, why the uneducated rubes working in the factories and fields cannot be trusted with free elections and free speech.) This certainly seems to be bad news for attempts at economically egalitarian societies. This tendency of class structures to resist disturbance seems to be a socioeconomic parallel to Le Châtelier's principle: class re-emerges even where strong efforts have been made to obliterate it, even if the new structure rests on slightly different characteristics - blood relationships, ability to amass wealth, maneuver in bureaucratic hierarchies, or to parrot dogma as a loyalty signal have all been criteria for these structures at various points in history, including now. There are not many people who believe that individual differences do not matter to economic success, and that individual differences appear entirely randomly across populations rather than in consistent, inter-generationally robust association - the disagreement tends to be over the mechanism that made the agents different (i.e. whether due to upbringing, opportunities, genetics, etc.) Even Marx had to recognize that individuals could not be expected to produce incommensurate with their ability. Therefore, it's hard to see how strongly wealth-redistributive policies could matter unless they were carried out continuously. In that case, it is also very hard to see why this would not necessarily result in overall slowing of economic growth and therefore, less happiness for everyone.
Some implications of the Mischelian world are not entirely pleasant to the more libertarian among us either, as they justify some degree of paternalism. All but the most absolutist libertarian concedes that there is a cut-off in the distribution of rational decision-making ability, beyond which individuals cannot be responsible only and entirely for him or herself. If you went to Steve the pianist's concerts and found that there were children or retarded or senile or insane people spending their last dimes on him, would you be comfortable with that? What if they were "normal", but instead of piano concertos Steve were selling lots in gambling games, or opium, or sexual acts? All of us have more trouble behaving with rational self-interest with certain goods and services. Keep in mind, the question is whether a just society allows Steve to sell such things, not whether he is moral in doing so - if indeed there is a difference between those two questions. If legal distinctions limiting commerce and other types of decision-making responsibility are seen as necessary for justice in a Mischelian world, this could ironically be seen simultaneously as a justification for elitism and paternalism as well as a reward for less responsible, productive agents.
Perhaps the solution in the Mischelian world is to define a cut-off for humans at the margins of rational decision-making ability, and then keep them being responsible for their decisions. In fact in our own Mischelian world, that's exactly what we do, for children and the mentally disabled, though especially with children we don't have the means or resources to determine exactly where each individual's rationality falls at every age. So, in most countries we arbitrarily choose an age of majority. (Straight-ahead as it seems, this practice is still attacked, as you can see with one hot-under-the-collar commenter at my outdoor-activities blog.)
The problem with cut-offs (of products - "alcohol isn't addictive and harmful enough to ban, but heroin is") or agents ("my daughter is only 14 but she's mature enough to be allowed to drive") is that they're coarse-grained approximations (often using proxy indicators like age), and in fact even if we're not below the lower cut-off on the rational decision-making spectrum, there are no doubt lots of people with overall better rational decision-making capabilities than us. These cut-offs are also based on rational decision-making over the long-term, which is often obvious after brief interactions (with the retarded or demented) but not always. Should a just society require you to assess the rationality of everyone with whom you engage in commerce, or of the particular decisions involving this particular transaction? When I was in college, a mom-and-pop sandwich shop opened up that had 25-cent burger specials on Friday nights. Like every other bottomless-stomached college student, I showed up every Friday and got in line and ordered 6 of them. Eventually they put up a sign asking us to please consider ordering something else because they lost money on every burger. Of course, we all had a good laugh at this, and ordered more burgers, and soon after they closed. Clearly their belief that our good hearts would prevent us from taking advantage of their kindness was false, and we knew it. Should they have been protected from making this decision, or from us mean students from taking advantage of them? Having met the couple and talked to them briefly, I can attest that they seemed non-retarded and non-demented, but I still might be smarter than them. Does that make a difference? Should we be protected, from heroin or from Steve's heart-rending performances (or should the more rational people be handicapped?) Is the cut-off for children and the disabled only a result of our limited methods and resources? That is to say, in a future of finer-grained social justice, is it desirable for technology to allow us a gradient of protection for individuals who are even a little bit unable to control themselves in certain circumstances, for example your blogger who has confessed to his chocoholism?
The issue with the Mischelian world is that there are differences between the agents that make up these societies that result from nature and are not eliminable by the application of justice (not yet), even though they definitely affect whether a just state obtains. It also seems that the coarse-grained nature of the way we protect the irrational from injustice results only from limitations in technology and resources, rather than from a positive decision that our protections should be only so detailed, and not go further. I believe the discussion will proceed in this century, and if it goes far enough in my own lifetime, Safeway will start refusing to sell me Kit Kats.
Conclusion: Wealth is Only a Contributor to Utility, But So Is Genetics
It seems obvious that the reason anyone cares about economic egalitarianism is because wealth relates to utility; that is, wealth is a proxy indicator of happiness, which is what we care about and why you're reading this. It is not clear that there can be such a thing as a just society that cares about economic equality but not utility equality. Gross National Happiness is the best known direct quantitative indicator of utility. As with wealth, utility is in part dependent on agent-specific traits which differ along a spectrum, and there is some indication that there is such a thing as a happiness set point. Needless to say, like many factors influencing rationality, happiness set point is a given, not subject to the decisions of a just society but absolutely impacting them. In a just society, do the naturally happier individuals owe cheering-up efforts to the naturally sadder? To refer to another of Nozick's thought experiments, in a sense the individuals at the low end of the happiness set-point curve, in a just society that works to raise their utility, are anti-utility monsters: in an effort to bring the unhappiest up to a certain cut-off point, the utility of the happier is consumed, and overall utility decreases.
Finally, I have alluded twice to our sense of justice not yet being able to eliminate these differences and therefore having to enact justice in the way society deals with the hands that its agents are dealt. It is my sense at least in the U.S. that those who are most in favor of wealth-redistributive policies are likely to be the most strongly opposed to even investigating whether there is a genetic basis for the rationality differences between agents, much less whether our sense of justice dictates that we do something to improve them. Such differences could certainly not be the only reasons for the persistence of inequality, but if they exist they would certainly be a root cause. In the coming decades we will understand much more about the genetics of cognition, and going forward, policy discussions about wealth inequality must make reference to these findings.
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