This expression incorporates three meanings of ‘place’:
the role or part played by good fortune in people’s lives, position in some social structure and place in its geographical sense. Each has an important bearing on human well-being. The crucial fact is that chance or luck are important elements in life. The crucial question to be explored is its moral significance.
That interest in this issue can be traced back to the ancient Greeks is explained by Williams (1985: 5):
‘Impressed by the power of fortune to wreck what looked like the best-shaped lives, some of them, Socrates one of the first, sought a rational design of life which would reduce the power of fortune and would be to the greatest possible extent luck-free.’ In those hazardous times, it was recognized that achievement of the good life might not be entirely a matter of individual volition. Williams (1985: 195) points out that most personal advantages and admired characteristics are distributed in ways which cannot be regarded as just,
and that some people are simply luckier than others;
morality is a value that transcends luck, and which has played a part in mobilizing power and social opportunity to compensate for misfortune.
The role of luck re-emerged in recent times in arguments about desert, central to the liberal egali-tarian perspective on social justice initiated by John Rawls. He began with the conventional system of
‘natural liberties’ in which careers are open to the talented, with all persons having equal opportunities in the formal sense of the same legal rights. However, there is no attempt to promote equality in background social conditions; far from it:
[T]he initial distribution of assets for any period of time is strongly influenced by natural and social contingencies. The existing distribution of income and wealth, say, is the cumulative effect of prior distributions of natural assets – that is, natural talents and abilities – as these have been developed or left unrealized, and their use favored or dis-favored over time by social circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good fortune.
(Rawls, 1971: 72) The obvious injustice of such a system is that it permits access to positions of advantage and distributive shares to be influenced by factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view. He therefore invokes the principle of ‘fair equality of opportunity’, under which persons with the same talent and ability and the same willingness to use them should have the same prospects regardless of their initial place in the social system. However, this conception also appears defective:
[E]ven if it works to perfection in eliminating the influence of social contingencies, it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents . . . distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.
(Rawls, 1971: 73–74) Erasing the distinction between what may broadly be regarded as environmental effects and natural
attributes achieves ‘democratic equality’, which strongly suggests equality of outcomes. Rawls has, in effect, made all sources of differential occupational achievement morally arbitrary. There is no case at the most basic level of justification for anything except equality in the distribution of Rawls’s primary goods of liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect. As Sandel (1982: 92–93) concludes: ‘No one can be said to deserve anything (in the strong, pre-institutional sense), because no one can be said to possess anything (in the strong, constitutive sense).’
This argument from arbitrariness features pro-minently in subsequent work on social justice. For example, Miller (1992: 228, 240–41) points to the social determination of the effect of a difference in raw talent, to inheritance transmitting unequal com-petitive resources along family lines, and to inequalities guaranteed by the organization of education and production. He concludes: ‘disadvantages in resources for social advancement are associated with generally inferior economic situations. It is as if the gamblers with the least funds were also dealt the fewest cards’
(Miller, 1992: 255). He also argues that the unchosen risks of market competition stand in need of justi-fication (Miller, 1992: 274), a point which has import-ant implications for the morality (or otherwise) of capitalism.
Place in its geographical sense is readily added to the argument from arbitrariness. This is illustrated by Baker:
So much of what people achieve is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, of having good luck in family, teachers, friends, and circumstances, that no one is in a strong position to take much credit for the way their lives turn out. There is no such thing as a literally self-made man [sic]. And so any judgement of desert will have to look closely at where responsibility really lies.
(Baker, 1987: 60; see also Barry, 1989: 226) Jones (1994: 167) points out that ‘the distribution of resources across the world is entirely fortuitous and that it is morally unacceptable that people’s lot in life should be determined by this accidental feature’. Barry (1989: 239) postulates Crusoe and Friday on two different islands, working equally hard and skilfully but with differences in production due to one island being fertile and the other barren, asserting that ‘if anything
can be called morally arbitrary – not reflecting any credit or discredit on the people concerned – it is this difference in the bounty of nature’.
The distribution of resources includes those created by humankind, like the local infrastructure, as well as those of the natural environment. It does not take a geographer to recognize the inequity of unequal access to facilities such as good schools (e.g. Barry, 1989: 220, 221) and of fiscal disparities between local govern-ments (e.g. LeGrand, 1991: 108, 128). This is all part of the undeserved inheritance. As Miller explains:
No one earns the right to be born to a family living in a spacious house in Armonk, New York, rather than on a straw mat in the slums of Calcutta. Yet the enormous differences at these starts include enormous differences in life prospects, given the same innate capacities and the same willingness to try.
(Miller, 1992: 298) The chance of birth in a particular place on the highly uneven surface of resources carries no greater moral credit than being born to a rich or poor family, male or female, black or white. And such initial advantage as arises from the place of good fortune is readily transferred to future generations, similarly devoid of moral justification.
As for the possibility of the disadvantaged seeking better opportunities elsewhere, for most people the capacity to change their place, from a poorly endowed to a richly resourced location (or state), may be as limited as it is to change their gender or skin pigmen-tation. Free movement is still ‘the civil right we are not ready for’ (Nett, 1971). Yet, in so far as rights of access to unevenly distributed resources are constrained by the boundaries of nation-states, as accidents of history, then this source of inequality might be considered morally irrelevant (Jones, 1994:
160). Indeed, the restrictive citizenship of Western liberal democracies has been described as the modern equivalent of feudal birthright privileges, and similarly hard to justify (Carens, 1987: 252).
The argument from arbitrariness, as outlined here, has attracted vigorous opposition (see, in particular, Anderson, 1999). Roemer (1996: 173) posits: ‘Although we may agree that family background, natural talents, and inherited wealth are all morally arbitrary, perhaps there is such a thing as freely chosen effort.’ There is a reluctance on the part of critics to concede to natural,
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social or chance circumstances everything about the individual, including responsibility for chosen life plans.
If this worries some liberals comfortable with the notion of individual autonomy, it is anathema to communi-tarians with thicker conceptions of human identity. As Walzer (1983: 261) explains, if the effort they expend, like all their other capacities, is only the arbitrary gift of nature or nurture, ‘while its purpose is to leave us with persons of equal entitlement, it is hard to see that it leaves us with persons at all’.
Those unwilling to assign everything about persons to morally arbitrary fortune face the challenge of how to draw the line among attributes. Dworkin (1981a, 1981b) argued that justice requires compensating individuals only for adverse aspects of their condition or situation for which they are not responsible, which excludes inclination to effort; outcomes should therefore be ‘ambition-sensitive’ but not ‘endowment-sensitive’, which leads him to equalize resources and not welfare. Further attempts to resolve the limits of individual responsibility include proposals for equal access to advantage (Cohen, 1989), equal opportunities for welfare (Arneson, 1989) and equalizing human capabilities (Sen, 1992). However, Roemer (1996, 1998) reveals conceptual and technical difficulties in sustaining particular cuts between circumstances for which persons cannot be held responsible and those for which they can.
Another line of critique is that initiated by Nozick (1974). He argued that persons have the moral right to use such natural endowments as intelligence and skill to their advantage, providing that this does no harm to others: the thesis of ‘self-ownership’. Similarly, persons are entitled to hold and benefit from natural resources, provided that they acquired them justly by initial acquisition or by transfer (i.e. gift, inheritance or purchase). His criterion for the justice of initial acquisition is that no other persons are thereby made worse off (Nozick, 1974: 178), a modification of the proviso of John Locke that an individual is entitled to appropriate natural resources providing that there is as much and as good left in common for others.
Many objections have been raised to Nozick’s entitlement theory (Smith, 1994a: 69–71; Roemer, 1996: 208–10). These include the difficulty of demon-strating that no one is worse off as a result of particular private ownerships of natural resources, and of tracing acquisition back through a series of transfers which, if unjust (e.g. involving deception, robbery or coercive acquisition) should be rectified. All this leaves Barry
(1989: 218) to remark: ‘From Locke to Nozick there is a long and disreputable tradition of using a fairy story about the way in which acquisition might have occurred as the basis for a defense of the status quo.’
An important issue arising from Nozick’s similar treatment of natural endowments and acquired holdings is whether they may be different in some sense relevant to the place of good fortune. Reiman (1990:
173–75) proposes that the ownership of the external world is different from ownership of one’s body, for the former can deprive others whereas the latter cannot.
Another difference is that people cannot change their entire body, but may be able to change their place on the earth’s surface. However, O’Neill (1991: 290) notes that the libertarian devotion to freedom does not extend to dismantling immigration laws: ‘their stress on property rights entails an attrition of public space that eats into the freedom of movement and rights of abode of the unpropertied.’ Any such system of exclusive ownership, which involves the differential power that some individuals have to compel others to work for them, is ‘effectively a system of forced labor’
(Reiman, 1990: 177). This can lead to an argument for collective ownership of the external world of natural resources (e.g. Cohen, 1986a, 1986b), whereas it is harder to envisage collective ownership of individual natural endowments.
Nevertheless, there is a strong supposition that groups of people are entitled to monopolize the resources of the territory which they occupy. This is encouraged by the modern concepts of national citizenship and sovereignty: The nation provides its members with an inalienable collective property: the land in which they have the right to live their lives’
(Poole, 1991: 96). This is true in a formal, legal sense, but begs the questions of the morality of national boundaries and their closure to outsiders. Furthermore, the case of the territorially defined group is different from that of the individual, in an important respect explained by Sandel:
[F]or the community as a whole to deserve the natural assets in its province and the benefits that flow from them, it is necessary to assume that soci-ety has some pre-institutional status that individuals lack, for only in this way could the community be said to possess its assets in the strong, con-stitutive sense of possession necessary to a desert base.
(Sandel, 1982: 101)
And without this, to rephrase Sandel (1982: 92–93) in the individual context, no group anywhere deserves anything. A community, or nation, might claim a right to land in which they have mixed their labour, and even their blood, and to the advantages to be derived therefrom. A similar argument might be applied to the physical infrastructure, built to give future generations as well as present people a better life. But this would still leave unanswered the possible injustice of initial acquisition, and the moral arbitrariness of the good fortune of inheriting favourable conditions for sus-taining a good life.
TOWARDS TERRITORIAL SOCIAL JUSTICE