Dworkin’s Equality of Resources Beyond Private Property

1. Introduction

In his book Sovereign Virtue, the influential philosopher Ronald Dworkin (2000) claims that for a government or sovereign to be legitimate, it must treat citizens with equal concern, which for Dworkin requires promoting equality of resources among citizens over their lifetimes. For Dworkin, the bundle of resources to be counted when measuring equality includes the work one does. Thus, if A and B acquire the same amount of resources over a lifetime but A does more work than B to get those resources, then A is worse off than B in resources. If A has less than B but does correspondingly less work, then A and B are equal in resources. Dworkin then asks what sort of society should be favored if equality of resources is favored. Dworkin argues that humanity should attempt to move toward a society whose main two features look like the outcome of (1) a hypothetical auction of all natural resources on a fantasy island of newly arrived immigrants with equal purchasing power, and (2) a tax system that the islanders have a duty to enact to reduce resource inequalities derived from brute luck (e.g., differences in natural talent). Dworkin (2000: 1, 7; 2011: 357) suggests that this will result in a society of third-way capitalism, with resources held as private property and significant progressive and redistributive taxation. For Dworkin, this is the sort of society that humanity has a duty to attempt to reform toward in the real world if a legal system of equal concern for all is favored.

Herein, I do not question Dworkin’s claim that equal concern of all citizens is the sovereign virtue, nor do I dispute that equal concern requires equality of resources, as defined by Dworkin, ¹ nor do I reject Dworkin’s use of a hypothetical island as a method for investigating the requirements of equality of resources. Rather, I question Dworkin’s conclusions about what sort of society equality of resources entails. I illustrate the problems with Dworkin’s stipulation that his imaginary islanders would not consider keeping resources as common property and would instead attempt to divide all resources on the island into equal bundles of private property via an auction.

Section 2 of this article outlines the imaginary auction Dworkin puts forward as the first step in achieving initial equality of resources and his reasons for advocating for this auction. Section 3 points out that, despite his claims, Dworkin himself does not favor what is traditionally conceived of as private property. Rather, he favors something identical to Billy Christmas’s liberal theory of property. Section 4 raises the problem of justice during Dworkin’s proposed auction process. I argue that an auction is an unsuitable way to establish initial entitlements because an approach to entitlements to resources would be needed in the absence of the completion of his proposed (potentially never-ending) auction. In section 5, I argue that a common-ownership approach to resources could provisionally overcome this problem. That is, if the islanders want equality of resources in line with Dworkin’s principles, it is more reasonable for them to treat all resources as common property, with individuals and groups only having specific occupancy, use, and possession rights.

Section 6 presents a further problem raised by Dworkin—resource acquisition through brute luck—that must be addressed continuously in any society according to the equality-of-resources principle. The section also outlines Dworkin’s proposed partial solution—a progressive taxation system. Section 7 suggests that enacting Albert and Hahnel’s participatory planning is a plausible alternative approach to addressing the problem of brute luck—one does not need to follow Dworkin’s proposal for a market system with progressive taxation. Lastly, the article’s conclusion summarizes its findings and briefly comments on the implications for all who want to promote equality of resources in the real world. It points out that not only does real-world justice entail moving toward common ownership (in the absence of an argument to the contrary) and potentially enacting participatory planning, it also means, contra Dworkin, that traditional liberal-democratic political methods are neither sufficient nor strictly necessary to put in place a just legal order. What is required is a political strategy based on building the organizational framework that can manage common ownership.

2. The Auction

Dworkin begins his discussion of the requirements of equality of resources by explaining that he assumes that equality of resources entails equality of private property. He acknowledges that this assumption is “arbitrary on any number of grounds” (Dworkin 2000: 65) but does not consider whether alternative possibilities might be more reasonable. However, I consider such an alternative here.

To understand what equality of resources looks like, Dworkin asks his audience to start by imagining a number of shipwrecked survivors who end up on a desert island with no foreseeable chance of rescue. These islanders believe that all resources (including work) on the island should be divided equally among them. They also assume that to initially establish equality of resources, all physical resources on the island should be divided as private property. Dworkin (2000: 67) adds that “They do not yet realize, let us say, that it might be wise to keep some resources as owned in common by any state they might create.” The islanders also accept what Dworkin (2000: 67) labels “the envy test.” According to this test, physical resources are divided equally among the islanders if, once the division is achieved, nobody prefers somebody else’s bundle. Dworkin suggests that the best way to satisfy the envy test and achieve equality in private property is for the islanders to hold an auction. Ideally an auctioneer provides the islanders with an equal number of clamshells that are valued by nobody on the island to use as currency for bidding in the auction. “Each distinct item on the island” (Dworkin 2000: 68) becomes a lot in the auction and goes to the highest bidder. However, once all items are sold, the auction is not over because the islanders have a chance to change their bids and restart the auction if they are unhappy with the results. The process is only over once all items are sold and nobody prefers anybody else’s lot, thus satisfying the envy test. This then is an initial equality of resources for Dworkin, to be further enhanced by redistributive taxation—discussed later in this article. For now, let us consider some problems with this approach to initial equality.

3. Auction of What?

A problem with Dworkin’s presentation of his proposal is that while he explains that he is discussing an equal distribution of private property, he is not using the term private property in the way that political philosophers usually do. As Billy Christmas (2021: 5–8) has discussed, in political philosophy, private property is usually taken to mean allodial title or complete dominion. Christmas cites Blackstone, who described private property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe” (Christmas 2021: 5).

However, Dworkin seems to favor something different. In order to maximize freedom, Dworkin favors islanders being able to buy rights to resources in the most abstract form possible. He writes: “Equality of resources prefers more abstract to less abstract auctions. . . because the general aim of that conception of equality, which is to make distribution as sensitive as possible to the choices different people make in designing their own plans and projects, is better achieved by the flexibility abstraction provides” (Dworkin 2000: 151). One requirement of abstract auctions is that resources should be auctioned off in as undeveloped a form as possible (e.g., trees rather than finished wooden products) so that they can be used in as many ways as possible. Another requirement is that more fine-grained types of rights over resources should be available for purchase than full private property rights. Significantly, Dworkin (2000: 152) further explains that abstraction “requires recognizing legal rights in property that improve divisibility, like rights of way over, and temporally bound interests in, land rather than only freehold interests.” This divisibility stipulation is in contrast to complete dominion. If others have a right of way over my property, I am duty bound to use my property in a way that does not infringe on their right of way over it. For example, I cannot put a building on my property across the path people need to use. My resource use is now accountable to them.

Meanwhile, if my right to a resource is limited by time, my rights are potentially further restricted. Suppose that I have a right to a piece of land for one day a week, but others have the right to it for six days of the week. That scenario places further restrictions on me. For example, I am presumably duty bound not to destroy or significantly alter that piece of land except with the permission of those individuals with the right to it six days per week. If I have a right to it one day a week for only a few years, I may be duty bound not to significantly alter it at all. Furthermore, if I have a right to a piece of land for only one day a week, I cannot sell it to somebody (or at least I cannot sell more than my right to use it one day per week).

Thus, while Dworkin describes his vision as a private property system, his own reasoning leads him to conclude that it requires an approach to control over resources that appears identical to Christmas’s (2021) liberal theory of property, which Christmas advocates as an alternative to private property. While, Christmas explains, private property rights entail control over objects tout court, according to Christmas’s liberal theory of property, property rights should “pertain to particular uses of external objects or spaces at particular times” (Christmas 2021: 1).

4. Survival and Justice During the Auction

A practical problem with Dworkin’s auction proposal is that it does not offer guidelines for just resource use by his islanders in the absence of the auction being completed. The significance of this problem is clear if it is noted that his auction could potentially take a very long time (as Dworkin acknowledges)—months or more, depending on the size of the island, the number of islanders, their tastes, and a number of other factors. There may need to be an exploration and survey of the island’s resources. Multiple factors might make a thorough survey and valuation very time consuming. For example, parts of the island might become flooded at certain parts of the year, thereby changing their value, or there might be wildlife on the island to study and take into consideration in valuations. If there are particularly valuable resources on the island, such as one freshwater source, or very few obvious sources of food, then those particular resources might become particularly valuable, and people might not settle for a bundle unless they get a sufficient share of those resources. Now, as discussed above, Dworkin favors specific time-bound use rights being made available for auction, so it is far more likely that some agreement will be made for access to invaluable resources than if the auction is limited to the acquisition of private property titles—that is, full, exclusive dominion—over those resources. However, since complete consensus is required, full agreement on the precise use and access rights over invaluable and other resources might never be achieved, and if it is, could plausibly take a very long time.

That being the case, the question arises: What would justice in holdings look like during the auction process? Are the islanders not allowed to use any resources at all while the auction process takes place or are they allowed to use anything they like? Is there some reasonable third possibility? If there is a lake on the island, are a few people allowed to claim the surrounding land and charge others for access to the water there? Are people allowed to chop down trees to make houses? If not, are they supposed to remain exposed to the elements through the auction period? If they are allowed to chop down trees, how many trees and how much housing space can each person claim? Can some people cut down all the trees and then charge everybody else for the timber? If an eccentric artist finds some iron ore and decides to build a large sculpture with it, are the other islanders permitted to take the ore from him, mid-sculpture, and say they need it to make ovens, tools, and other more practical goods? Dworkin provides no answers to these questions.

How can this oversight be addressed? If the islanders believe—as Dworkin stipulates they do—that they should behave justly and that justice requires equality of resources, then they need a way of using resources in an egalitarian manner in the absence of an auction being completed. In fact, each individual islander needs an approach to using resources in line with the principle of equality of resources in the absence of any sort of agreement being made between themselves and other islanders over what equality of resources looks like.

5. Justice for Islanders

In this section, I outline a theory of justice that is in line with equality of resources and can be adhered to by the islanders in the absence of an auction or any other form of social agreement—a version of common ownership that I simply label common ownership. However, before doing so, it should be noted that my claim here is not that common ownership is the only or even most reasonable theory of justice that is compatible with the principle of equality. Rather, my claim is a more modest one: that a common-ownership approach to resources is a more reasonable way to achieve equality of resources than Dworkin’s auction. I am open to the possibility that it may later come to light that there are other theories of justice that are more compatible with equality of resources. However, in the absence of an argument that there is another approach to resources that is more compatible with the equality-of-resources principle, my claim is that supporters of equality of resources should favor common ownership.

Put briefly, according to common ownership, the world is owned in common, but persons can have reasonable possession, occupancy, and use rights over their equal share of the world’s resources, while at all times recognizing that they should be accountable to others for their resource use. ² The accountability to others is to ensure that they do not use more than their fair share or take sole possession of a share of resources that could be more reasonably managed collectively. Dworkin believes that equal ownership of worldly resources means equal amounts of liberal (what he calls “private”) property, but this result is because (as he admits) he arbitrarily restricts his understanding of ownership to only what he thinks of as private ownership (although he outlines a liberal property view of ownership). If the possibility of common ownership is accepted, it can be said that everybody can have an equal share of the world’s resources without either liberal or private property being involved.

I now outline a further description of common ownership. According to common ownership, ultimate decision-making power over the stipulations of reasonable resource use lies with the majority of owners. For example, suppose that seven sisters inherit a house. If four of the seven sisters decide something should happen to that house—such as that it should be renovated—then that decision can be considered legitimate. However, I suggest that it is not necessary under common ownership for an owner to get prior permission from the majority of the other owners before making any use of the resource. It is sufficient that each owner’s use of the resource is accountable to the majority of other owners. According to this approach, as far as reasonably possible, one should seek prior permission from other owners before using a resource. However, it is legitimate to use resources without prior permission, provided the use is reasonable. For example, if the house was empty and a sister somehow found herself stranded and had to sleep there one night without permission from the other sisters, that situation would presumably not be considered unreasonable. However, if a sister decided to smash one of the house’s windows—simply because she felt like it—that action would be considered unreasonable, and she should accept reasonable sanctions, such as paying for it to be fixed.

At times it will be impossible to get permission from an absolute majority, in which case a practical majority must become the relevant authority. For example, suppose two sisters are on a holiday hiking in the wilderness and the other sisters lack the ability to contact them. In that case, a majority of the five remaining sisters will be the practical majority and have temporary authority in the absence of later being overruled by an absolute majority. Note, however, that this temporary authority should not be considered as three sisters temporarily being able to assert their authority over the absolute majority. Rather, the practical majority should see its role as being in a caretaker position from which it makes good faith efforts to approximate its understanding of what the absolute majority favors. For example, suppose that the front door of the seven sisters’ house is red. Two of the sisters think that they want to paint it black, but they know the other five sisters are not as keen on the color black as them and would likely object. If four of the sisters go on holiday in the wilderness, thereby leaving the two sisters who favor a black door in the practical majority (since there remains at home only one sister who opposes the black door), it would be an abuse of their temporary authority to call a meeting to decide on whether to paint the door black. They must at all times make good faith attempts to take the interests of the other owners into account when decision-making. ³

What does reasonable use look like on an island in the absence of permission from others? I suggest that each islander should seek to use resources in such a way so that resource use by others is minimally restricted. This step is to avoid inadvertently using more than one’s equal share or using up resources that could be more reasonably managed collectively. Of course, what minimally restricting others from resource use looks like in practice will depend on the details of the island and the people on the island. However, as a starting point, it presumably means that individuals should take water from the river or lake but should as far as possible not exclude others from doing likewise. People can build shelters but not claim vast swathes of land as their own personal gardens. As much as reasonably possible, people should also check with others nearby to determine if it is suitable to chop down particular trees for timber to make shelter. The islanders should also seek to make themselves accountable to the other islanders for their resource use.

What sort of accountability processes should the islanders seek to set up to make themselves as accountable as reasonably possible to the majority of owners for their resource use? If there are only a few islanders, then presumably they will face a simple situation similar to the seven sisters managing common ownership of their house with each other. The islanders can have a quick initial conversation on how to use resources and continue to check in with each other when they are unsure if they are using too much. However, instead suppose there are five thousand islanders—the number of passengers a large cruise ship carries—and the island is quite large, with islanders spread all over the island. Then, a difficulty arises. Managing the island resources like seven sisters managing a house is no longer suitable. The quick initial conversation approach is based on ease of communication between a limited number of people. However, this ease of communication reduces as the number of owners increases. More opinions need to be shared with more people, and any debates may become interminable.

An accountability process that involves less direct communication between the islanders is necessary. To solve this problem, I suggest a nested decision-making process. I take the term nested from Ostrom (1990: 101), who observed that all successful real-world, large-scale, common pool resources she studied were managed via “nested enterprises.” These are large-scale enterprises in which populations have local autonomy over parts of the enterprise but are accountable to nonlocal members to remain within the broader rules of the enterprise. These enterprises also have processes in place to allow locales to make cross-locale decisions. Ostrom (1990: 102) gives the example of a Filipino irrigation system:

There are two distinct levels in the Philippine federation of irrigation systems. The problems facing irrigators at the level of a tertiary canal are different from the problems facing a larger group sharing a secondary canal. Those, in turn, are different from the problems involved in the management of the main diversion works that affect the entire system. Establishing rules at one level, without rules at the other levels, will produce an incomplete system that may not endure over the long run.

The nested decision-making process which makes people as accountable to each other as possible for all resource use (not just accountability over specific resources) is Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism. This system makes persons accountable most immediately to their closest neighbors, and subsequently to wider populations, without the need for everybody to be in direct communication with people outside their local neighborhood. I have previously summarized Bookchin’s idea as follows:

Bookchin argued for a system of nested democratic policy-making councils or “commune of communes.” . . . The most basic decision-making unit would be the neighborhood municipality. All persons would have equal decision-making power in this municipality, with decisions made at meetings that all persons should be free to attend. The municipality would be federated with others, with democratically elected delegates going up to the city level (with perhaps one or more layers in between), then the national level, and eventually the global level. As far as possible, the delegates would not have decision-making power but merely administrative duties, with decision-making power over federal activities remaining with the relevant municipalities. (Jarrett 2023: 109)

In the island scenario of five thousand people, this system can be applied by having a few neighborhood councils federating into an island council. All islanders are allowed to make use of a reasonable amount of resources but are ultimately accountable to the island council for their continued (reasonable) resource use. Most immediately, they are accountable to their neighborhood council. In the absence of any agreement over resource use, persons can use resources they see as reasonable for decent survival, but at the soonest opportunity they should seek permission for maintaining that use/control from their neighbors. Presumably this involves, perhaps at a neighborhood meeting, informing—in broad outlines—the neighborhood of what resources they are using or want and seeking permission to maintain or gain control of those resources. Rules for further neighborhood resource use can also be drawn up at such meetings. These rules have to respect the equality of resources principle. I go into more detail on what this process might look like in section 7, but for now it can be acknowledged that certain rules are clearly unsuitable. For example, people cannot agree to give one person all the resources and make everybody else that person’s tenants. Once reasonable rules are established, individual persons only have to inform the neighborhood if they think they are breaking—or are in danger of breaking—those rules. Persons can also report others for breaking the rules.

Aside from making decisions on local resource use, each neighborhood council would have a duty to set up multineighborhood village federations with nearby neighborhoods whereby each neighborhood checks with other neighborhoods to ensure that resource use in each neighborhood is acceptable to each other’s members (presumably making use of mutual inspections by delegates who report back to their neighborhoods). The village-level federation can also make use of decisions on large-scale resources that the neighborhoods might share or want to share. For example, a river might go through multiple neighborhoods, and agreements need to be made on irrigation, cleanliness, and so forth. There might also be invaluable resources in one neighborhood, such as medicinal plants or iron ore, for which sharing agreements need to be made. These villages can conglomerate into an island federation in which each village checks with the other to ensure their resource use is acceptable to each other’s members (again, presumably making use of mutual inspections).

In this manner, each islander is ultimately accountable to all other islanders and holds equal decision-making power with all others regarding island resource use. However, there is no need for everybody to meet all five thousand islanders, nor to have in-depth knowledge of the resources in other parts of the island. All that is needed is, first, to pay attention to their own and their immediate neighbors’ resource use to make sure it aligns with the rules. Second, they need to agree to a system of mutual inspection with other neighborhoods that allows everybody to ensure that people in other neighborhoods are obeying the rules. Third, they need to establish processes for agreeing on multi-neighborhood projects, such as river management and road construction. It is thus seen that the libertarian-municipalism form of nested decision making appears to allow for everybody to be accountable to everybody else for their resource use in a logistically feasible way. It also respects the requirement of common-ownership justice—that, in the absence of being able to obtain permission for one’s resource use from an absolute majority, permission should be sought from a practical majority. In the case of the islanders, in the absence of an islandwide federation of decision making being formed, islanders should seek to make themselves accountable to their neighbors and fellow villagers.

6. The Problem of Brute Luck

I have herein argued that a common-ownership approach to initial acquisition of resources makes more sense than favoring initial acquisition through an auction. I have further suggested that this common-ownership approach to acquisition should be favored in the absence of an argument for a sounder approach. However, a significant problem Dworkin (2000: 73–83) finds with his proposed equally divided liberal property system—the injustice of unequal resources emerging through brute luck—can also potentially arise under common ownership. Thus, it is worth looking at this problem and Dworkin’s proposed solutions. A secondary argument I make is that while the brute luck problem Dworkin is concerned with does arise under common ownership, there is a possible alternative solution to the one suggested by Dworkin.

To understand the problem, recall that when Dworkin aims at equality of resources, he is aiming for nobody to be envious of the total bundle of work and material goods that a person acquires over a lifetime. Inequalities in stuff are only legitimate if they are the outcome of differences in work. Inequalities due to brute luck are illegitimate. Importantly, Dworkin explains that not all inequalities that seem to be due to brute luck actually are. For example, imagine a house being struck by lightning, catching fire, and being completely destroyed. If the owner, Bob, did not take out insurance, then his losing everything is partially his own fault. The risk Bob takes by refusing to take reasonable steps to insure is the cost of his failure to take those reasonable steps. Thus, if he has not taken reasonable steps, he should bear the cost of the accident. Dworkin (2000: 341) explains that the equality of resources ethic means that people should be equally placed with regard to risk, not completely sheltered from risk or its effects.

However, there are certain inequalities that will be due to brute luck. The one Dworkin focuses on is inequalities that emerge from people’s innate talents, but there are others. ⁴ Dworkin considers the problem of inequality due to luck to be a market phenomenon—individuals with marketable innate talents will find it easier to make money. However, the problem is more general. Suppose that everybody possesses their own little farm of equally productive, equally sized land and lives as self-sufficient producers. Also suppose that A is better at farming, building, and manufacturing than B due to luck (perhaps B is disabled or A just happens to be extremely innately gifted at the forms of production available to both). Thus, A is able to create more goods than B with the same amount of work or produce the same amount of goods with less work. This sort of inequality is a problem for Dworkin. He states that equality “requires that no one have less income simply in consequence of less native talent” (Dworkin 2000: 102). The problem is exacerbated by market process, but essentially the same problem is at play. If person A has more innate marketable talent than person B, then person A will have to do less work than person B to gain an increase X in income. That being the case, person B will justly be jealous of person A’s resources if they both do the work required to earn increase X or if they do the same amount of work and A gains more than B. Although Dworkin sees this sort of inequality as unjust, he believes that is impossible to fully overcome. It can only be partially reduced.

As a partial solution, Dworkin argues that it is legitimate for the auctioneer to impose a tax that would mimic the plausible results of a super-hypothetical market to insure against poverty. Dworkin claims that in a fantasy world where all differences in earning potential due to natural ability only emerge at a certain age (say, 20), and people are able to take out insurance at an earlier age (say, 18) before they know of these differences, it is presumable that most people will take out insurance against being a low earner. ⁵ The premiums they take out—and that insurers agree to—will plausibly look like progressive, redistributive taxation wherein people pay more for their premium if they end up earning more and receive a pay-out if they end up earning a very low income. Dworkin believes that it is legitimate (i.e., in line with the principle of equal concern—the basis of the equality of resources ethic, as mentioned in the introduction) to impose a tax on islanders that mimics the results of them all taking out such insurance schemes. Dworkin acknowledges that this is only a partial solution. Income will still correlate with native talent under his scheme. He notes, for example, that individuals with extraordinary beauty will still be able to make movie star income despite not putting more effort into their work than lower earners. However, he does not see an alternative solution. In fact, he invites alternative suggestions (Dworkin 2000: 104–6).

Although I have suggested that the initial allocation of resources should take the form of common-ownership–based use rights rather than private property, the problem of inequalities deriving from brute luck still arises. For example, if, under a common-ownership system there are no markets and each person possesses a small self-sustaining farm, it will still be possible that A will be able to produce more than B because of unequal native talent. If there are markets—which common ownership allows for—then the problem will be even worse. Thus, if addressing the problem of income due to brute luck is a concern, an amendment to my proposal of common ownership should be considered, and an attempt should be made to achieve an improvement on a Dworkin-type progressive taxation amendment.

7. Effort Ratings, Participatory Planning, and Equality of Resources (Equity)

This section outlines an approach to allocation of resources that should be considered by the hypothetical islanders if they want to enact the equality of resources principle and want to avoid people gaining income due to brute luck: namely, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory planning (Albert and Hahnel 1991; Albert 2003; Hahnel 2012). Participatory planning is an aspect of Albert and Hahnel’s proposal for a participatory economy (Parecon) vision. Parecon is an economic vision designed to respect five principles: (1) equity: “remunerate according to each person’s effort or personal sacrifice” (Albert 2003: 34) (identical to Dworkin’s principle of equality of resources); (2) solidarity: entwining people’s interests rather than fostering competition; (3) self-management: decision-making proportionate to how much the decision impacts oneself; (4) diversity: the paths to fulfillment should be diversified rather than narrowed (there should be more variety than just McDonald’s and Starbucks); and (5) efficiency: expressed needs should be met without waste (Albert 2003: chap. 3). The remainder of this section discusses only the participatory planning aspect of Parecon because I am only concerned with the equity principle from the list above, and participatory planning is the tool designed to achieve equity.

The institutions needed for participatory planning are worker and consumer councils and iteration facilitation boards (IFBs). Under the system, all able adults join producer and consumer councils, which in turn are part of producer and consumer federations, respectively. The federations negotiate total production and prices of products between each other with the help of IFBs (who some people will be employed in). The negotiation starts by IFBs proposing indicative prices for all goods. These indicative prices are estimations of the opportunity costs of producing the goods. Albert and Hahnel (1991) suggest previous years’ prices can be used as a guide. These indicative prices are merely indicative because goods cannot actually be bought at those prices. Goods only gain real prices once a planning process is complete. Consumer councils respond to these indicative prices with consumption proposals. An individual will make a list of individual consumption goods (clothes, jewelry, toiletries, laptops, holiday packages, and so forth) and will also work with councils to come up with joint proposals, such as for a local swimming pool or improved roads. Meanwhile producer councils respond to initial indicative prices in two ways. First, they make their own consumption requests for inputs they will need for production (raw materials, machinery, etc.). Second, they make production proposals.

Once the proposals are in, the IFB comes into play again:

[It] adds up all the requests to use, and offers to supply each natural resource, each category of labor, each kind of capital good, and each pollutant, and adjusts its estimate of the opportunity or social cost of the good up or down in proportion to the degree of excess demand or supply for that good. These. . . steps are repeated in subsequent rounds, or “iterations,” until there is no longer any excess demand for any final or intermediate good, natural resource, category of labor, capital stock, or permission to emit any pollutant. (Hahnel 2012: 92)

Thus, at the total federation level, supply meets effective demand, as dictated by price signals, and production meets consumption.

However, at the individual citizen level, the process aims to allow income (consumption) to correspond to effort. Albert and Hahnel (1991) suggest that individuals should be paid according to an effort rating they get for their work from their colleagues. Thus, if one is deemed to put in an average level of effort in production, one is entitled to the social average level of income. However, if one is judged to have put in more or less effort than average, one’s income changes accordingly. In this manner, if the members of a council have a combined higher or lower per capita effort rating than the members of other councils, that council will have correspondingly more or less income per capita than other councils. Income should thus even out around an average, meaning that total income (and consumption) meets total production, despite income not being a function of so-called productivity (more accurately, economic power ⁶ ) at the individual level but instead—at least ideally—being a function of effort. Thus, while under Dworkin’s proposal income systematically corresponds to productivity—and is thus systematically unjust according to his own principle of equality of resources—that should not be the case under a participatory planning system if effort ratings are accurate.

How are effort rating judgments made under participatory planning? Albert and Hahnel (1991) suggest that colleagues judge each other’s effort. It should be noted that one tool that can plausibly help in generating effort ratings is what Albert and Hahnel label balanced job complexes or what I label balanced jobs for short. Balanced jobs are supposed to solve two problems. First, they equalize empowering work (work that expands knowledge, capacities, decision-making power, etc.) with disempowering work (work that merely saps powers) in an aim to reduce inequalities in decision-making power (Albert 2003: 17–18, chap. 6). If some people are always organizing production in meetings while others always do the same simple physical task, some accumulate the knowledge and skills necessary for decision making while others do not, thereby potentially undermining the possibility of broadly equal decision-making power needed for participatory planning to function as intended. However, having a system of balanced jobs also serves a second function—it aims to equalize drudgery. If it is the case that drudgery is equalized, then a simple way to reward effort would be to reward individuals who work longer hours. Despite recommending balanced job complexes, Hahnel (2012: 64) suggests that experimentation with different ways of dividing work and rewards is useful, possible, and encouraged in a participatory society.

Before considering possible problems with getting accurate effort ratings, two points about how it needs to work should be made. First, participatory planning cannot work to create equality of resources. It can only—if successful—work to maintain it. If A possesses a mansion, a yacht, and a swimming pool when participatory planning begins, but B only possesses a small semidetached house, if they do the same amount of work, then inequality will be maintained for the rest of their lives. Thus, aiming to use participatory planning for the purpose of promoting equality of resources requires an initial egalitarian distribution of resources before participatory planning is up and running. That being the case, the steps outlined in section 5 of this article cannot be overlooked before participatory planning is enacted.

Second, participatory planning will likely take a significant amount of time to get up and running on the island. Thus, what is required is for islanders to keep participatory planning in mind as a long-term goal that regulates their approach to production and distribution in the absence of an initial islandwide, equity-focused participatory plan being completed. This strategy might mean, for example, attempting to enact participatory planning at the village level before islandwide agreements are made.

Now I present the obstacles to effort ratings being accurate. Following Dworkin’s stipulation that everybody on the fantasy island is dedicated to justice, I set aside what might be labeled moral obstacles to enacting participatory planning—namely that people may intentionally break the rules. Rather, this section outlines what I label technical obstacles. These are obstacles to achieving income for effort in a society where everyone is dedicated to income for effort. The first such technical obstacle is that it is implausible that islanders can fully observe the work others do. This fact inevitably reduces the accuracy of their effort judgments.

The second technical obstacle is more decisive: Even if the islanders see the work everyone else does or measure work done accurately, effort is a mental state, and people do not have access to other people’s mental states. A and B might do the exact same amount of work, but there is no way of knowing if this equal amount of work required an equal amount of effort. It might be the case that it takes A far more effort than B, but it cannot be known for certain. Thus, strictly speaking, effort cannot be measured. The best that can be done is to make estimations, but those estimates are potentially wildly inaccurate.

The third problem is unconscious bias. Earlier in this section, I pointed out that it is implausible that everybody can monitor other all other people’s work. This problem is compounded by the possibility of human error (in the form of, say, unconscious biases) that may distort people’s estimations of work done by different individuals and groups. For example, an islander may see their friend, A, doing the same as B, who is not their friend, but might remember more of A’s work. Similarly, unconscious bias might play a role in estimating how much effort people are putting into their work. For example, it may be known that friend A did the same amount of work as B, who—again—is not our friend, but friends of A might believe A put in more effort. Thus, despite individuals trying to give accurate effort ratings, those ratings might be consistently biased.

How accurate one thinks an effort rating system can be depends on whether one thinks these problems can be significantly overcome. First, can monitoring policies be put in place to get somewhat accurate representations of work done? Second, despite not having direct access to the mental states of others, can somewhat accurate estimations of effort be made by extrapolating from one’s own experiences and broader perceptions of society? For example, do mental experiences and clues gathered from observing society make it plausible to believe that working extra hours usually takes extra effort? Third, are people likely to act in a fairly unbiased way toward colleagues on the whole (e.g., sexism and racism will not play a significant role in effort ratings)? If one’s answers to these questions are No, then one is likely to see effort ratings as completely unviable. If, on the other hand, one’s answers are Yes, then one will believe that effort ratings will likely be a quite accurate way of rating effort.

So far, this article has referred to two main ways that attempts can be made to reward effort on an island under conditions of commonly owned resources. The first—which this article has only briefly alluded to—is to reward productivity. If all islanders are given their own means of production as personal possessions and allowed to produce for themselves autarkically or engage in market transactions, that becomes one method of them gaining income due to their productivity. Another way of gaining income for productivity is participatory planning, but instead of workers being rewarded according to effort ratings, they are paid by worker councils according to the perceived value they contributed to that worker council. Under any income for productivity system, a Dworkinian progressive tax will reduce the impact of brute luck on each person’s income—but only partially, for reasons already discussed earlier. The second method of rewarding effort this article has referred to is effort ratings—which, as discussed, can be enacted under participatory planning. Suppose that the islanders are limited to choosing between an income for productivity system of some kind on the one hand and an effort rating system under participatory planning on the other. Which one of those choices each individual islander favors as the island’s economic system depends on which type of system they think will diverge least from accurately rewarding effort. If they believe that the divergences from effort will be smaller under an effort rating system than under a productivity and progressive taxation system, then they should choose an effort rating system. Meanwhile, they should choose the productivity-based system if they believe the opposite. If there is disagreement on the island, presumably islanders will have to vote to agree on one of the two systems to enact islandwide or enact different systems in different parts of the island.

8. Conclusion

Dworkin believes that equality of resources requires capitalism. In a follow-up publication, he provocatively states: “An egalitarian economy is a basically capitalist economy” (Dworkin 2011: 357). Capitalism is a vague term with multiple definitions. When Dworkin uses the term, he means a liberal property system that allows market exchanges. However, Dworkin tempers his bold claim by stating that to overcome the problem of brute luck, equality of resources entails a highly redistributive form of capitalism—more egalitarian than existing welfare states. Despite tempering his claim, Dworkin is wrong about the vision his principles require. His vision is based on his unjustified assumption that the ideal form of equality starts with an egalitarian auction of liberal (what he calls private) property. Once this assumption is dropped, it becomes clear that common ownership is a more reasonable way to adhere to the equality of resources principle and should thus be favored in the absence of an argument that another approach will adhere to the principle even more closely. I have suggested that on Dworkin’s imaginary island, common ownership can be enacted via a libertarian-municipalism governance system. I have also argued that anyone who wants to address the problem of brute luck need not favor a reward for productivity system (e.g., a market system) combined with progressive taxation, as Dworkin suggests—they can plausibly favor an alternative of income decided via effort ratings under participatory planning.

This article has focused on equality of resources on an imaginary island. It is impossible to go into the full implications of this analysis for individuals who favor equality of resources in the real world. However, following Dworkin’s suggestion that “a useful theory of distributive justice must show which of the minimal steps we can actually take now are steps in the right direction” (Dworkin 2011: 352), it is worth concluding by pointing out one significant difference between the real-world requirements for moving toward Dworkin’s vision on the one hand and moving toward a common-ownership–based system on the other. The steps Dworkin outlines for moving toward his vision are restricted to various legislative reforms. He does not explicitly say this, but presumably the role of most people would be limited to the usual liberal-democratic forms of political action—primarily voting. Regardless of whether traditional liberal-democratic methods are a suitable method for achieving Dworkin’s proposed vision, those methods are neither sufficient nor necessary for achieving the common-ownership approach this article has outlined.

Liberal-democratic methods are insufficient for achieving the goal because what is needed to administer common ownership in the manner this article has outlined is for persons to build and participate in the relevant organizational framework or commune of communes. This process is not something that legislative reforms can achieve alone. Traditional liberal-democratic political activities can potentially play an indirect role by electing a sympathetic government that encourages people to build and participate in such a commune, but ultimately the work of building and administering the commune must be done by the participants themselves. Traditional liberal-democratic methods might also not be strictly necessary for reforms to be passed to give administrative power to this commune. It might be feasible for people to take the initiative in building the organizational framework while ignoring traditional political activities, and then—if organizational participation becomes large enough—the participants in this organization could forcefully take power from an existing unsupportive government. Thus, the use of traditional liberal-democratic political activities seems to be neither sufficient nor strictly necessary for achieving common ownership—something that should be favored by anyone who supports equality of resources in the absence of an argument for a more fitting vision.