John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill on Equality and the Redistribution of Wealth, Part I
Part I: What makes us equal?
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Introduction
This two-part essay will look at the writings of John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill to try to understand how their moral philosophies related to their politics. I will compare their respective notions of equality with their ideas of political and economic equality by assessing their advocacy of wealth redistribution. It may be no spoiler to say that their cases entail minimal encroachment on libertarian territory and each respect the primacy of the capitalist’s right to property.
First, I will set out the basis for equality found in Locke’s deontology and Bentham and Mill’s utilitarian consequentialism. Second, I will investigate the extent to which they each advocate for the redistribution of wealth. All three projects incorporate equality, to varying degrees, and I shall place each thinker on a continuum to mark this variance. The continuum is polarised by laissez faire to the right and socialist attitudes to the left; although none of the thinkers resides at either pole, Locke is positioned fairly centrally, with Mill to his left and Bentham to his right.
Basis for Equality
In order to qualify for a spot on our continuum, I will extract each thinker’s basis for equality; that is the philosophical or religious underpinning for their view of each human’s moral value. This will be done in two steps. First, I shall explore each thinker’s view of our nature: our creation and constitution. (There is a vast gulf between Locke’s theological approach and that of his utilitarian consequentialist counterparts; however, both approaches see all people as morally equal.) I will then discuss each thinker’s view of rights. I will argue that the dichotomy between Locke’s deontology and his counterparts’ legal positivism does not obscure the path to equality, as rights perform the same function in both ontologies: to protect basic equality.
John Locke
To understand Locke’s theory, ‘we must consider, what State men are naturally in, and that is, a State of perfect Freedom [… and] also of Equality’ (Locke, 1988, p. 269). This equality is universal and afforded to individuals regardless of wealth, gender or intelligence, as he makes clear when rebutting Filmer:
‘God… gave the World to Mankind in common, and not to Adam in particular… For wherein soever else the image of God consisted, the intellectual Nature […] belong’d to the whole Species’ (Locke, 1988, p. 162).
Here he upholds the Judeo-Christian notion of imago dei, the image of God, rendering both genders as equal (Waldron, 2002). Claims that Locke’s patriarchialism extends to the ownership of property are somewhat ignorant of his contention that ‘whether her own Labour or compact gave her a Title to [property], ’tis plain, Her Husband could not forfeit what was hers’ (Locke, 1988, p. 391). Equality rests solely on a person’s ability to employ their elementary reasoning that will bring them into accordance with God (Dunn, 1969; Waldron, 2002). Given this element of contingency, how then does Locke reconcile his intention to prevent all (regardless of wealth, gender, intelligence and status) from being ‘subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent’ (Locke, 1988, p. 330)?
C. B. Mcpherson argues that this is a caveat to universal equality. However, as James Tully points out, the necessary degree of intellect is so low that those who do not meet this criterion are medically recognised as mentally incapacitated. (It is obviously practicable for such people to be subject to the political power of others (Locke, 1988, p. 308; Tully, 1980).) Indeed, Locke refrains from subjugating the labouring classes based on the idea that they are somehow incapable of intellectual reasoning (Waldron, 2002; Tully, 1980; Tyrell, 1987). He compares the position of the labourers to ‘those who are cooped in close by the Laws of their countries’ (Locke, 1996, p. 330); laws, he maintains, that are made by people who are more concerned with increasing their popularity than employing their reason to seek truth (Locke, 1996, p. 335). Moreover, he criticises the wealthy for their ‘intellectual laziness’ (Waldron, 2002, p. 89; Locke, 1996, p. 330), and philosophers for abandoning ‘native rustic reason’ in the quest for knowledge and who instead use their intellectual power for the mere ‘brandishing of syllogisms’ (Locke, 1996, p. 320).
Equality in Locke’s philosophy serves two purposes: as a premise and a constraint (Waldron, 2002). It is the premise of his idea of political authority, namely property rights, and how we ought to treat one another, and it is a constraint on political authority and property rights, ensuring that social life is ordered around the principle that we are all equal (Waldron, 2002).
Jeremy Bentham
Were Locke’s philosophy flows from natural rights, Bentham’s philosophy is both distinct and significant because it reconceptualises traditional notions of equality into concepts of equalisation. Instead of pursuing Locke’s line of inquiry (asking if and how people are really equal), Bentham tries to determine whether people should be equalised and by how much (Parekh, 1970).
Bentham’s notion of equality is that the twinned principles of pain and pleasure are the universal bases of morality from which the principle of utility derives. This process involves the pursuit of happiness as the chief end for human existence and the driver of human nature. In the absence of pain and pleasure, ‘[man] is inert, inactive, like matter. Indeed they are to man what the law of gravitation is to the material world.’ (Bentham, 1843, p. 264). He believed that it is possible to reduce all passions, wills and desires to pains and pleasures and anything that can yet be reduced to a pain or pleasure is a fiction with no independent existence. It is the primacy and universality of these two principles that render all individuals equal (Parekh, 1970; Postema, 1998).
John Stuart Mill
Mill maintains what he refers to as Bentham’s Dictum: that an ideal society is where ‘every man [is] to count for one and no one to count for more than one’ (Mill J. S., 1979, p. 60; Bentham, 1843). However, Bentham and Mill’s notion of equality is not to be confused with a justification for equal treatment.
Given that individual circumstances differ greatly, equal treatment is likely to result in unequal amounts of pain and pleasure. It is the real and not the nominal equality of pain and pleasure that matters; therefore, there is no objection to giving different degrees of punishment to people guilty of the same offence, for instance (Parekh, 1970; Mill J. S., 1979; Bentham, 1843). Imagine a judge tasked with sentencing two criminals convicted of the same crime. If one is the main breadwinner for his family and the other is single with no dependents, a nominally equal sentence or penalty will result in unequal quantities of pain (Bentham, 1843; Parekh, 1970). Mill and Bentham argued that it is incumbent on the government to serve the greatest happiness of the community; so when two individuals experience equal quantities of pain or pleasure, the government is to treat them equally, and unequal quantities experienced requires unequal treatment as a way to equalise the final experience.
In stark contrast to Locke’s ideas, Bentham and Mill see that the government has no obligation to treat men equally. Its sole political obligation is to recognise the ‘political arithmetic’ (Parekh, 1970, p. 482). This is the principle of utility which, according to Mill (1979, p. 58), affirms no more than ‘the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness as of all other measurable quantities.’
Of Rights Natural and Positive
The grounding of rights in natural law was borne out of the tyranny and turmoil of 17th century Europe. Locke is perhaps the most famous proponent of natural rights, although not the first. He builds on his deontological basis for equality, drawing on Grotius (1625) and Pufendorf (1672), to enshrine his system of natural rights in natural law (Tuck, 1979; Tyrell, 1987).
The laws of nature ensure that no man is at ‘liberty to destroy himself… any creature in his possession […and] no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker’ (Locke, 1988, p. 271).
Aside from its deontological basis, much of the infrastructure within the libertarian edifice has been built upon this platform (Dunn, 1969). And despite the persuasiveness of Macpherson’s (1962) thesis, Locke is not an apologist for the bourgeoisie, nor do his ideas seek to subjugate those who do not own property to a life of servitude and poverty; rather, his advocacy of natural rights represents a bulwark to such evils. It is simply a miscomprehension of Locke’s theory to suggest that property rights remain inviolable even when capitalist elites have acquired all material goods at the expense of the need of the masses. His ‘limitations’ caveat the right to appropriate: they ensure property rights are legitimate inasmuch as there is provision for all and nothing goes to waste (Waldron, 2002; Tully, 1980; Waldron, 1988; Locke, 1988). If such limitations are not respected, natural law is transgressed and it is incumbent upon the government to appropriate and redistribute.
Bentham and Mill disagree with Locke on many things but they all agree that the redistribution of wealth is permitted and even necessary for the welfare of the state. For Bentham, ‘all inequality is a source of evil’ (Bentham, 1843, p. 160); however, both he and Mill were disposed to the fear that the idea of natural rights would ferment revolutionary fervour in Britain, as it had done in America and France. (Natural rights were associated with the French Jacobins and the violence of the time, and therefore were perceived as ‘mischievous fictions and anarchical fallacies that encourage civil unrest, disobedience and resistance to laws, and revolution against established governments’ (Bentham, 1843, p. 913).) Consequently, British liberalism embraced non-revolutionary foundations for civil and political rights and many liberals turned to utilitarianism.
Contained within this philosophy is a complete rejection of natural rights. They are, according to Bentham, ‘simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, — nonsense upon stilts’ (Bentham, 1843, p. 914). Only political rights, positive rights, established by government count for anything — there are simply no rights without the law. In this rejection, Bentham and Mill break from the tradition that held utility and rights as different aspects of the same process by proposing that social utility represents both the goal of policy and the standard by which it is measured (Schofield, 2003; 2006). The effect on property rights is thus: ‘property and law are born together, and die together. Before laws were made there was no property; take away laws, and property ceases’ (Bentham, 1840, p. 139). It follows that a redistribution of wealth is well within the government’s competencies as there is no natural basis that renders property rights inviolable. Moreover, if calculated to be in accordance with the utility principle, redistribution may well be appropriate; such is the underlying idea of Welfarism and Pareto efficient economics (McMurty, 2001; Sen, 1999; Shapiro, 2011).
Conclusion to part I
Notwithstanding their ontological discrepancies, Locke, Bentham and Mill all aim to promote equality in the political and economic realm, to different degrees. Whether they presuppose a natural or artificial origin for rights doesn’t matter, as neither choice prohibits them from advocating for the redistribution of wealth.
I have now placed our three thinkers onto the continuum. In order to determine where on the continuum they each lie, I will now assess the extent to which they each stand by their notional equality in relation to their writings on wealth redistribution. Please see Part II for this.
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