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G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?Why Not Socialism?  by G. A. Cohen, Review by: Reviewed by Alasdair MacIntyreEthics, Vol. 120, No. 2 (January 2010), pp. 391-395Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651141 .Accessed: 18/11/2012 08:08Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews 391“Sentences, Belief and Logical Omniscience; or, What Does Deduction Tell Us?”Review of Symbolic Logic 1:459–76).As for the second item, let me start by observing that in the past Binmorehas equated Rawls’s defense of the maximin principle to an attempt to overthroworthodox decision theory. As I mentioned above, he rehearses this line of ar-gument in chapter 3, where he shows that a maximally risk-averse decision maker(an agent who only differentiates between receiving nothing and receiving any-thing) is indifferent between prospects with different minima. He goes on tospeculate that the idea may seem “popular with some authors” (53) because themaximin strategy is the strategy by von Neumann and Morgenstern’s theory intwo-person zero-sum games. While it may be possible to argue that there isn’tmuch sense in making decisions as if we were constantly playing a zero-sumgame with nature in which nature were constantly trying to harm us as muchas possible, the leap to discrediting Rawls’s use of the maximin criterion underthe veil of ignorance seems now unjustified in light of what Binmore concedesin a footnote (52 n. 8): “Rawls’s intuition in favor of the maximin criterion isperhaps better captured by [the] theory of decisions under complete ignorance.”The theory of decisions under complete ignorance is not von Neumann andMorgenstern’s utility theory, which only covers decision under risk. But then, ifRawls’s intuition has to be evaluated within a theory of decisions under completeignorance, the conclusion that Rawls is overthrowing orthodox decision theoryloses its teeth since the original position lies in a large world. The decisionmaker is not able to attach definite probabilities to the possible outcomes ofher decision, and adopting the maximin criterion is not tantamount to uncer-emoniously getting rid of orthodox Bayesian decision theory. In fact, Binmore’scriticism of the maximin rule as a criterion for decisions under ignorance insection 9.1 only makes use of the argument that the extreme risk aversion andconservativeness implied by the criterion make it unfit as a general decisionrule, but since it does not consider the specific circumstances of the originalposition, the argument does not rule out that the maximin criterion could bethe reasonable choice for decisions under a veil of ignorance.Giacomo SillariUniversity of PennsylvaniaCohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism?Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 83. $14.95 (cloth).If there had been a prize for the best very short book on political philosophypublished in the last two hundred years, it should have been won by The Com-munist Manifesto. If there were a prize for the best very short book on politicalphilosophy published in the last twenty years, an interesting competitor wouldbe Why Not Socialism? It presents with remarkable clarity a case that needs to beheard and evaluated. It offers more for reflection than many books three orfour times its length. And its virtues make us the sadder to remember that thisThis content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions392 Ethics January 2010will be the last work that we shall have from G. A. Cohen, along with his muchlonger book Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2009).Everything that Cohen wrote is rewarding to read. He is likely to remainmost famous for his first book, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). But the same admirable lucidity and ca-pacity for constructing searching arguments are as evident in his final writingsas in his first. Yet, as with The Communist Manifesto, the questions that Why NotSocialism? provokes are as important as the theses that it defends. What are thosetheses? Cohen defines socialism by proposing two sets of principles, principlesthat require equality of opportunity and principles designed to sustain com-munity. So far as opportunity is concerned, Cohen is a radical egalitarian. Weneed to get rid of not only those inequalities that arise from “socially constructedstatus restrictions” (15), such as those imposed by the hierarchies of feudalsocieties and those grounded in prejudice against certain groups, but also thosethat arise from disadvantages of birth or of upbringing or of education and inaddition those that derive from “differences in natural and social capacities andpowers” (18). The only tolerable income differences under socialist equality ofopportunity would “reflect nothing but different individual preferences, includ-ing income/leisure preferences” (18). For the only inequalities consistent withgenuine equality of opportunity arise from free choices that happen to turn outbadly for those who made them. Yet even such inequalities are unacceptablefrom a socialist standpoint because to tolerate them would be incompatible withthe realization of the ideal of community.That ideal requires “that people care about, and, where necessary andpossible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another”(34–35). Such caring precludes the acceptance of any large inequality becausethe consequent differences between one person and another in respect of hard-ships and challenges will be a barrier to communal relationships between them.A second requirement is imposed by the principle “according to which I serveyou not because of what I can get in return by doing so but because you needor want my service” (39). Such communal reciprocity is to be contrasted withmarket reciprocity “since the market motivates productive contribution not onthe basis of commitment to one’s fellow human beings and a desire to servethem while being served by them, but on the basis of cash reward” (32).There are types of situations, Cohen suggests, in which we all of us endorsethese principles. His example is that of a camping trip, where the campers“cooperate within a common concern that, so far as possible, everybody has aroughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that shecontributes, appropriately to her capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing ofothers” (4–5). What Cohen hoped to achieve by writing this book was to convincehis readers that, even when they are not on principle-informed camping trips,they should accept these same principles for the ordering of their social lives.He therefore poses two questions. Is the socialist ideal, so understood, desirable?And is it feasible? As to its desirability, Cohen considers two objections. The firstis that on such camping trips the right of individuals to make their own choices,whenever those choices are inequality engendering, is not honored. To this hereplies that only some limited types of choice are constrained on such occasionsThis content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews 393and that anyway in a market society a great many of our choices are constrained,often in ways and to an extent of which we are unaware. A second objection isthat, although socialist values may be attractive among a group of friends on acamping trip, they are inappropriate in the varying and complex relationshipsof a large-scale society. To which Cohen’s reply is that he takes it that “all peopleof goodwill” would be happy with a state of affairs in which “I treat everyonewith whom I have any exchange or other form of contact as someone towardswhom I have the reciprocating attitude that is characteristic of friendship. . . .It is surely a welcome thing when more rather than less community is presentin society” (51–52).What then about the feasibility of socialism? Cohen considers two ways inwhich something approaching the egalitarian and communal ideals that hevalues might be achieved. Joseph Carens in his Equality, Moral Incentives, and theMarket (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) described an economy inwhich the capitalist market operates just as it does at present, but inequalitiesin income and wealth are prevented by a tax rate system that “effects a fullyegalitarian post tax distribution of income” (64). And more than one proponentof market socialism has argued for the possibilities of an economy in whichdifferent enterprises compete in a market, but each enterprise either is ownedand controlled by those who work in it or is publicly owned (68). Among pro-ponents of market socialism, it is John Roemer (A Future for Socialism [Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1994]) to whose work Cohen pays particularattention.One difficulty with Carens’s scheme, as Cohen sees it, is that it invites usto envisage something difficult to envisage, a capitalist society whose members,by their acceptance of equalizing taxation, willingly give expression to a collectivenon-self-interested choice. And this point against Carens could be made morestrongly than Cohen makes it. In a Carensian economy, individuals in theireconomic activity will act as self-interested competitors would act, while in theirpolitical decisions the same individuals will act as altruistic egalitarians wouldact. How this might become possible is puzzling. So Cohen turns to the casefor some type of market socialism.The problem with any version of market socialism is that its market ex-changes will both generate inequalities incompatible with the socialist ideal andmake it difficult to sustain “the value of community” (75). Cohen thereforeconcludes that, although either a Carensian economy or some version of marketsocialism would be greatly preferable to capitalism as it now is, we do not as yetknow how to make the transition from an economy in which greed and fearhave the functions that they now do, and in which the forms of market exchangepromote inequalities and damage community, as they now do, to a nationwideeconomy that will embody the procedures and ethos of the camping trip thatCohen described. But Cohen insists that we do not know “that we will neverknow how to do these things” (70). And, although the obstacles of “entrenchedhuman power and individual human selfishness” are serious, “they are not reasonto disparage the ideal itself” (80).A great many people should be encouraged to read Cohen’s little book,among them at one extreme those students and young workers whose politicaleducation is just beginning and at the other the owners of those mindless mouthsThis content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions394 Ethics January 2010of the American Right for whom ‘Socialism’ has been reduced to a term ofabuse. My hope is, however, that those who read it and are attracted by itsarguments will be provoked to go beyond it. For it is, for all its clarity, itspersuasive argument, and its charm, a very odd book for someone stronglyinfluenced by Marx to have written. Begin not with Marx himself but with theG. A. Cohen who wrote Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. In that book hetook himself to be following Marx when he endorsed a “broad generalization”to the effect that “good productive forces do not yield to less good ones, in thenormal run of things. . . . Yet productive forces are frequently replaced by better ones”(154). A key question, therefore, about any possible transition from capitalismto socialism would concern whether future socialist economies can be expectedto be more productive than the capitalism of the present is. And in that bookCohen had posed the question of the costs to and benefits for working-classpeople of bringing about a socialist revolution, concluding that only when cap-italist “crisis is bad enough” will “the dangers of embarking on a socialist rev-olution become comparatively tolerable” (244–45).Such considerations, which are relevant to any attempt to answer the ques-tion “Why not socialism?” are ignored in Why Not Socialism? Instead, Cohenseems to suggest that we begin by considering and debating socialism as anabstract ideal and only then proceed to ask what would have to be changed inour social and economic order if we were to achieve that ideal, taking it forgranted throughout that his readers—or at least a very large number of us—are already the kind of people who, once we had understood the ideal and howto achieve it, would be moved to bring it about. Marx had a name for thosewho proceeded thus: ‘Utopian socialists’. And it was Marx’s view that there isno direct path from Utopian socialism to socialism. Why not? Because abstractideals are always insufficient by themselves to move human beings to systematicpolitical and economic action. It is only insofar as we become able to relatesuch ideals to the ends for which we now recurrently struggle in our everydaylives within the social and economic structures of advanced capitalism that webegin to see the point of and to be moved by those ideals. And here somethingelse is missing from Cohen’s argument.What working people care fiercely about in their everyday lives generallyincludes their families first and foremost, the quality of life in their neighbor-hood, the wages and conditions of work in their particular workplace, andwhatever is salient to their leisure, such as identification with some football orbaseball or cricket team. These are local concerns and attachments, and theyare the concerns and attachments of those who are nowadays often enoughsmall and vulnerable property owners, who own so little that they prize whatthey own all the more. Of these dimensions to the lives of working people andof their importance for political and economic motivation, there is no sense atall in Cohen’s account. And in this respect he resembles all too many of hisUtopian socialist predecessors. They never learned what G. K. Chesterton andthe distributists understood very well, that the only viable politics of the exploitednowadays is one that enables them to defend what they rightly value in thepresent against the threats of capitalism and the modern state and, in the courseof defending it, to discover how much more needs to be changed, if they areThis content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews 395to be liberated from exploitation and repression. What kind of politics wouldthat be here and now?Even to begin to answer that question by turning to issues concerning thewages and the housing needed to sustain family life or the type of trade unionorganization needed to defend wages and working conditions or the politicsneeded to secure adequate housing would take us surprisingly far away fromthe text of Why Not Socialism? For oddest of all is its silence about the politicsof the present. Yet any ideal able to provide us with a vision of our commongood that is a genuine alternative to the globalizing capitalism of advancedmodernity must be expressible in and through practices of resistance to capi-talism and the state that are more than negative, piecemeal, and ad hoc resis-tances. An ideal that cannot be so expressed is irrelevant.To this the reply may be: “you are asking too much from a short book.”What more could Cohen have been expected to achieve in eighty-two smallpages than he did achieve? But to this it must be said that what Cohen in factsucceeded in showing us is that the question “Why not socialism?” may be posedbut cannot be answered in eighty-two pages. And that too is a lesson worthlearning.Alasdair MacIntyreUniversity of Notre DameLuper, Steven. The Philosophy of Death.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 253. $90.00 (cloth); $28.99(paper).The Philosophy of Death is a comprehensive examination of important death-related questions in metaphysics, axiology, and the normative ethics of behavior,such as: what is it to be alive and to die? Can death be bad for the one whodies, and can events occurring after her death harm her? What makes killingwrong? It also contains extended discussions of related practical questions, suchas: by what criteria can we determine that someone has died? Are euthanasiaand abortion morally permissible?Here are some of the most important claims Luper defends. (i) For a thingto be alive is for it to contain “durable replicators” that provide the capacity forthe thing to maintain itself. (ii) Conversely, to die is for that capacity to bedestroyed. (iii) Death is bad for someone iff (if and only if) it makes her lifeworse than it would have otherwise been. (iv) When death is bad for someone,it makes that person worse off either at times before she died or at the time ofdeath. (v) Events occurring after someone dies can harm her in the same waydeath itself does: by frustrating the interests she had when she was alive. (vi) Killinga competent individual is wrong iff she did not make an informed choice to bekilled; killing an incompetent individual is wrong iff it harms her.Concerning the more practical questions, Luper argues that euthanasia andsuicide are, at least sometimes, morally permissible. In the case of voluntaryThis content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:08:02 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 . Pp. 83. $14.95 (cloth)

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Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 . Pp. 83. $14.95 (cloth)

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