Free Market Fairness

by John Tomasi

Market democracy sees society as a public thing, the basic institutions of which must be justifiable to the people living under them. Persons are conceived not as disconnected happiness seekers but as democratic citizens. They are moral beings with lives of their own to lead who are simultaneously committed to living with others on terms that even the weakest among them can accept. At base, society is a fair system of cooperation among citizens committed to respecting one another as responsible self-authors.

Liberal justice requires that we ask of any regime: does this regime create the social conditions in which all citizens, viewed as individuals, can exercise and develop the moral powers they have as citizens: the capacity for responsible self-authorship, and the capacity to also respect the self-authoring capacity of their fellow citizens?

When considering any social system as a whole, cosmos and purpose, far from being opposites or antagonists, go together. In the social setting, spontaneous orders seem positively to require such normative evaluations: evaluations, that is, in terms of social justice.

If liberal citizens lack personal control of material resources, that socialist critique goes, their rights and liberties may be of little value. Market democracy affirms this socialist insight and extends it. As people gain wealth, their formal freedoms become more valuable to them. As societies grow more affluent, more citizens have opportunities to travel the world, develop themselves intellectually or culturally, benefit from medical advances, enjoy new technologies, start business ventures, return to school or try new occupations, create organizations of various kinds, and, if they choose, walk into the Ritz and order tea. When considering the complex list of DP goods, free market fairness sees increases in income as holding out the promise of increasing the worth of the freedoms enjoyed by all citizens.

A well-ordered market democratic society is one in which all citizens are experiencing a distinctively liberal form of growth and development. The capacity of citizens to develop the moral powers they have as citizens is paralleled by the capacity of the society as a whole for growth and development. There is no natural limit to either.

But providing a guarantee in the form of a government program is not the same as delivering the good in question. Indeed, if we consider the way real societies function, official guarantees in the form of government-run programs sometimes may make the delivery of the good less likely than it might otherwise be. As Schmidtz explains, the issuing of government guarantees regarding social goods not only collectivizes but also externalizes responsibility for the provision of those goods. This is why such guarantees sometimes exacerbate problems they were intended to alleviate: “If we wanted to guarantee that the poor would be left behind, here would be the way to do it: teach them that their welfare is someone else’s responsibility.”